U.S. Golan Case Receives Final Verdict

January 24, 2012

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against University of Denver music professor Lawrence Golan in a long-running copyright case. The Supreme Court upheld a 1994 law that granted copyright protection to a large number of foreign works that had been freely available in the public domain because they were published in countries that previously didn’t have copyright relations with the U.S.

The majority opinion, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, stated “the majority opinion which held that Congress had acted within its powers in granting the protections and that the law does not violate the Constitution’s Copyright Clause, it does not violate the First Amendment rights of anyone, and it does not deviate from any long-standing historical practice or perception.

“Congress had reason to believe that a well-functioning international copyright system would encourage the dissemination of existing and future works.”