The 10th circuit court of appeals overruled the dismissal of the case Golan v. Gonzalez in the context of works previously in the public domain.

The background is as follows, following the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, the Supreme court ruled that it’s pretty much the exclusive purview of Congress what a “limited time” is under that clause of the Constitution.

However, it also ruled that there could be a 1st amendment challenge if there were an action taken that “altered the traditional contours of copyright protection.”

The Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) brought US intellectual property law in line with that of other countries. In so doing, it removed a number of works from the public domain, and placed them back under copyright, where people who had previously used them found that they had to pay (frequently exorbitant) license fees.

Lawrence Lessig Lessig argued that putting public domain works back under copyright was unprecedented in US law, and hence it significantly altered the “traditional contours of copyright protection”, and overruled the dismissal, remanding the case to the lower court.

This, along with Kahle v. Gonzalez, which argues that the change from opt-in copyright to opt out-copyright alters the “traditional contours of copyright protection”.

My guess is that the current Supreme Court will rule for the rich pigs, but there are a number of people who have reevaluated the role of IP in our society following the Crackberry case.