Court Weighs Copyrights Of Foreign Works

Executive Director of the Fair Use Project, Anthony Falzone's argument before the Supreme Court in the case of Golan v. Holder is featured in the below Daily Journal article by Robert Iafolla

A divided U.S. Supreme Court considered Wednesday whether to allow the government to remove millions of creative works by foreign authors from the public domain in an effort to persuade other countries to respect copyrights on American products.+ Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor emerged as vociferous, and at times unyielding, defenders of a federal law giving foreign works copyright protection. But the other justices appeared skeptical. ...

Falzone argued that Congress already set that time of protection at zero for foreign works by previously determining they're ineligible for copyrights - in other words, the copyrights' "limited time" of protection under the Constitution had expired. If Congress has the power to go back and change that determination using the new law at issue, then there is effectively no way to know when copyrights end, he said.