10th Circuit Decides Major Copyright Case
Congress acted within its authority when it restored U.S. copyright protection to foreign parties whose works had entered the public domain, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday in Golan v. Holder, Law Week Colorado reports.
The 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act restored the copyrights to foreign works that had lapsed due to failure to comply with formalities, lack of subject matter protection, or lack of national eligibility. These works include books, film and sheet music — Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” for example.
A group of artists who made use of the works while they were in the public domain filed a lawsuit in Colorado’s federal court to challenging the restoration of copyright, arguing that doing so violated their First Amendment rights.
