United States Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments in Allen v. Cooper
November 5, 2019: In what may be the most important copyright case in decades, the court heard oral arguments in Allen v. Cooper. In 2015, according to a complaint filed in federal court, North Carolina pirated footage of Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge. Then North Carolina passed "Blackbeard's Law" to justify that misuse. Rick Allen of Nautilus Productions
has taken his case to the Supreme Court of the United States. The issue
is whether Congress validly abrogated state sovereign immunity via the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act
in providing remedies for authors of original expression whose federal
copyrights are infringed by states. North Carolina maintains that
sovereign immunity prevents it from being held liable for damages, as
other copyright infringers would be. "States can hold copyrights. They
can be copyright holders. And they can sue anybody in the world for
infringement," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said during arguments.
"There's something unseemly about a state saying, yes, we can hold
copyrights and we can hold infringers to account to us, but we can
infringe to our heart's content and be immune from any compensatory
damages."
A ruling in the case is expected in May or June of 2020.
