How Restoring U.S. Protection to Foreign Copyrights Affects Media Uses

Following the Supreme Court's decision in Golan, anyone wishing to use foreign works first published abroad between 1923 and 1989 may face increased cost and risk. Some of the renowned authors and creators whose works were first published abroad in this time period ' and whose works enjoy restoration under the URAA ' include M.C. Escher, Federico Fellini, Maxim Gorky, Alfred Hitchcock, C.S. Lewis, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Sergei Prokofiev, Pablo Picasso, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, J.R.R. Tolkien and Virginia Woolf.

In this article, we first revisit the legal backdrop to '514 of the URAA, the statutory provision at issue in Golan, which we follow with a review of the Golan decision itself. Next, we proceed with an analysis of Golan's potential legal and economic ramifications for businesses relying on the restored works impacted by Golan. The article concludes with a brief discussion of Golan's potential fallout, namely, increased pressure on Congress to enact reforms for “orphan works,” which are older and more obscure works with minimal commercial value that have copyright owners who are difficult or impossible to track down.