Court Takes Away Some of the Public Domain

An anonymous reader writes "In yet another bad ruling concerning copyright, a federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling, and said that it's okay for Congress retroactively to remove works from the public domain, even if publishers are already making use of those public-domain works. The lower court had said this was a First Amendment violation, but the appeals court said that if Congress felt taking away from the public domain was in its best interests, then there was no First Amendment violation at all. The ruling effectively says that Congress can violate the First Amendment, so long as it feels it has heard from enough people (in this case, RIAA and MPAA execs) to convince it that it needs to do what it has done." TechDirt notes that the case will almost certainly be appealed.

Comments

Re:The RIAA are not people

[PotatoFarmer]

I guess that would depend on what you mean by "using it". The ruling itself appears to be mostly concerned with people who have produced derivative works (e.g. performances, recordings, etc.) of items that are in the public domain in the US but were originally produced and are still under copyright in their country of origin. As far as what will happen, I'll let this excerpt from ruling speak for itself:

"a reliance party may continue to exploit that derivative work for the duration of the restored copyright if the reliance party pays to the owner of the restored copyright reasonable compensation . . . ." If the parties are unable to agree on reasonable compensation, a federal court will determine the amount of compensation

Re:ALL copyright is a restriction on free speech.

[ghrucla]

There are two legal issues here:
1) This is a straightforward application of the Supreme Court precedent in Eldred v Ashcroft. Lower courts are bound by SCOTUS precedent and so this is an easy call in terms of case law even if you think (as I do) that it's bad policy and Eldred was wrongly decided.
2) It's not a First Amendment issue but an Article I, Section 8 issue and in particular if you read the clause "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" as meaning that Congress can only grant IP rights when such rights are likely to incentivize creativity (which would exclude retroactive grants).

Re:Finally the right call

[Anonymous Coward]

The part of Section 514 at issue here applies only to (1) works that were based on public domain works which (2) fell into the the public domain because the US was not complying with its Berne Convention obligations. Section 514 restores copyright to the works /that should have been copyrighted to begin with/. It does this because international obligations require it (not because Congress wanted to). It applies only retrospectively, and CANNOT be used to protect new works in any new way.

This means that (1) the US is only meeting treaty obligations, providing the same level of protection as that afforded in other WTO nations, and (2) the application is limited to a finite number of works and affected authors.