Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-04-05240/USCOURTS-caDC-04-05240-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 890
Nature of Suit: Other Statutory Actions
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

——— 

Argued March 10, 2005 Decided May 24, 2005 

No. 04-5240 

LUCK'S MUSIC LIBRARY, INC. AND

MOVIECRAFT, INC., 

APPELLANTS

v. 

ALBERTO R. GONZALES, 

ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES AND

MARYBETH PETERS, REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS, COPYRIGHT 

OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES, 

APPELLEES

——— 

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the District of Columbia 

(No. 01cv02220) 

——— 

 Daniel H. Bromberg argued the cause for appellants. 

With him on the briefs were Geoffrey S. Stewart, Carmen M. 

Guerricagoitia, and Jonathan L. Zittrain. 

John S. Koppel, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, 

argued the cause for appellees. With him on the brief were 

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Peter D. Keisler, Assistant Attorney General, Kenneth L. 

Wainstein, U.S. Attorney, and William G. Kanter, Deputy 

Director. 

Before: RANDOLPH and ROBERTS, Circuit Judges, and 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge. 

Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS.

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: Plaintiffs challenge the 

constitutionality of § 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements 

Act (“URAA”), Pub. L. No. 103-465, 108 Stat. 4809, 4976 

(1994), codified at 17 U.S.C. §§ 104A, 109, which 

implements Article 18 of the Berne Convention for the 

Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. The section 

establishes copyright in various kinds of works that had 

previously entered the public domain, and plaintiffs argue that 

any such provision violates the Copyright and Patent Clause 

of the U.S. Constitution. U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8. Finding 

no such bar in the Constitution, the district court dismissed 

plaintiffs’ claims. (A district court in Colorado has recently 

agreed. Golan v. Gonzales, No. 01-B-1854, 2005 WL 914754 

(D. Colo. Apr. 20, 2005).) We review the district court’s 

order de novo, Barr v. Clinton, 370 F.3d 1196, 1201 (D.C. 

Cir. 2004), and affirm. 

* * * 

Section 514 of the URAA establishes copyrights of 

foreign holders whose works, though protected under the law 

where initially published, fell into the public domain in the 

United States for a variety of reasons—the U.S. failed to 

recognize copyrights of a particular nation, the copyright 

owner failed to comply with formalities of U.S. copyright law, 

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or, in the case of sound recordings “fixed” before February 

15, 1972, federal copyright protection had been unavailable. 

See 17 U.S.C. § 104A(h)(6). Plaintiff Luck’s Music Library 

is a corporation that rents and sells classical orchestral sheet 

music. Moviecraft is a commercial film archive that 

preserves, restores, and sells old footage and films. Both 

plaintiffs allege that because of the URAA they may no longer 

freely distribute certain works in their portfolios. 

The Copyright and Patent Clause provides that Congress 

shall have the power “to promote the Progress of Science and 

useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and 

Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and 

Discoveries.” U.S. Const., art. I, § 8, cl. 8. The Clause 

authorizes the granting of a temporary monopoly over created 

works, in order to motivate authors and inventors while 

assuring the public free access at the end of the monopoly. 

See Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 

U.S. 417, 429 (1984). Plaintiffs are correct that the Clause 

“contains both a grant of power and certain limitations upon 

the exercise of that power.” Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder 

Craft Boats, Inc., 489 U.S. 141, 146 (1989). But they are 

wrong that the Clause creates any categorical ban on 

Congress’s removing works from the public domain. 

Plaintiffs first suggest that to pass muster under the 

Clause a statute must create an incentive for authors to create 

new works: legislation must “promote the progress of 

science.” In their view, copyright laws that remove works 

from the public domain “do not provide significant incentives 

for new creations” because “rewarding prior works will not 

provide any significant incentive to create new works because 

it will not change the costs and benefits of doing so.” 

Plaintiffs’ Br. at 17. This of course was the core argument 

advanced against the Copyright Term Extension Act in Eldred 

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v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003). There it was argued that 

extensions for works already in existence could not possibly 

affect authors’ incentives to create those works. As a result, 

the Eldred plaintiffs urged, Congress utterly lacked the power 

to grant such extensions, id. at 199-204, the extension was an 

irrational exercise of the power, id. at 204-08, it failed to 

promote the progress of science, id. at 211-14, and it failed to 

comply with a quid pro quo requirement embedded in the 

Clause, id. at 214-17. In all of these variations the argument 

lost. 

It is true, of course, that changes in the law of copyright 

cannot affect the structure of incentives for works already 

created. But the knowledge that Congress may pass laws like 

the URAA in the future does affect the returns from investing 

time and effort in producing works. All else equal, the 

expected benefits of creating new works are greater if 

Congress can remedy the loss of copyright protection for 

works that have fallen accidentally into the public domain. 

The Eldred Court made a parallel point in rejecting plaintiffs’ 

quid pro quo theory, noting that any author of a work “in the 

last 170 years would reasonably comprehend, as the ‘this’ 

[i.e., quid] offered her, a copyright not only for the time in 

place when protection is gained, but also for any renewal or 

extension legislated during that time.” Id. at 214-15. 

To be sure, the extra incentive afforded by § 514 is 

meager. But to the extent that Eldred requires any direct 

incentive, it plainly need not be great. Justice Breyer argued 

in dissent that the extension upheld there would, assuming a 

1% chance that a work would yield $100 a year in years 55-75 

of the work’s life, have a total present value of seven cents. 

Eldred, 537 U.S. at 254-55 (Breyer, J., dissenting). The 

majority did not contest his figures, compare id. at 209-10 

n.16 (doubting whether the founders, in limiting copyright to 

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“limited times,” “thought in terms of the calculator rather than 

the calendar”), so we may assume it regarded such a low 

value as direct incentive enough. 

Perhaps more than enough. It is by no means clear that 

Eldred requires a direct incentive at all. The majority 

expressly relied on its understanding that adoption of the 20-

year term extension enhanced the United States’s position in 

negotiating with European Union countries for benefits for 

American authors. Id. at 205-06. Here, similarly, the Senate 

argued in support of § 514 that its adoption helped secure 

better foreign protection for US intellectual property and was 

“a significant opportunity to reduce the impact of copyright 

piracy on our world trade position.” S. Rep. No. 100-352, at 2 

(1988). Plaintiffs do not gainsay the value of the rule in § 514 

as a bargaining chip. 

On a pragmatic plane, plaintiffs argue that a bright line 

rule against laws that remove works from the public domain 

would assure a sound balance between the founders’ desire to 

allow proper incentives for creative effort and their anxiety 

about political establishment of unjustifiable monopolies. 

Here they make a public choice argument: 

 Just as the English Crown could not be trusted to 

grant socially beneficial monopolies over existing goods 

and industries, Congress cannot be trusted to issue patents 

and copyrights over existing goods and services because 

there is a “persistent asymmetry” in the legislative 

process. [William M.] Landes & [Richard A.] Posner, 

The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law 408 

[(2003)]. 

Plaintiffs’ Br. at 21. They go on to argue that “authors and 

large entertainment companies” have a clear and focused 

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interest in obtaining exclusive rights of works in the public 

domain, whereas those likely to be adversely affected are a 

diffuse group who at the time of legislation will lack an 

adequate interest to justify any lobbying effort (or, plaintiffs 

might add, even much effort at becoming informed on the 

matter). Id. 

The picture is a bit overdrawn; authors and the large 

entertainment companies are themselves users of 

copyrightable works, as literature is itself a source of literature 

(think of Shakespeare and Holinshed). Further, the principled 

and rigorous application of plaintiffs’ public choice analysis 

would radically tilt the relations among the three branches of 

government. But the key flaw in the argument is that the 

Eldred plaintiffs were similarly arguing for a bright line rule 

(no extension of copyright terms for already completed 

works), in a context with a closely parallel lobbying 

imbalance, and Eldred rejected their claims. 

Plaintiffs completely fail to adduce any substantive 

distinction between the imbalance (if it be that) in tacking 20 

years onto a copyright term about to expire in (say) a year, 

and extending protection to material that has fallen into the 

public domain. One can imagine that creation of copyright ex 

nihilo would entail special practical difficulties for parties that 

have relied on the apparent availability of works in the public 

domain only to find free access snatched away, but § 514 

protects those who have relied without notice, see § 514(d)(2), 

17 U.S.C. § 104A(d)(2), and plaintiffs don’t challenge these 

provisions’ adequacy. 

Unable to offer a material distinction between this case 

and Eldred in terms of the language of the Copyright and 

Patent Clause or the proper roles of Congress and the 

judiciary, plaintiffs turn to a historical distinction. They say 

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that taking works out of the public domain is without 

precedent, in contrast with the congressional pattern of 

extensions of copyright for completed works on which the 

Court relied in Eldred. Especially lacking, they say, is a 

practice of the First Congress, whose action bears the 

imprimatur of the founders themselves. See Eldred, 537 U.S. 

at 213-14. 

In fact, evidence from the First Congress points toward 

constitutionality. The Copyright Act of 1790 granted 

copyright protection to certain books already printed in the 

United States at the time of the statute’s enactment. See 1 

Stat. 124 (1790). If such works were unprotected by common 

law copyright, that statute would necessarily have granted 

protection to works previously unprotected—that is, works in 

the public domain. The historical evidence on this point is 

contested, but as early as 1834 the Supreme Court was of the 

view that the Act of 1790 created new copyright protection 

rather than simply recognizing existing protections, relying on 

the statutory language (the author “shall have the sole right,” 

etc.) in reaching that conclusion. See Wheaton v. Peters, 33 

U.S. (8 Pet.) 591, 661 (1834) (“Congress, then, by this act, 

instead of sanctioning an existing right, as contended for, 

created it.”). 

Apart from the Act of 1790, plaintiffs insist that no 

federal statute has ever authorized removing work from the 

public domain. But the government and the district court 

point to other statutes that seemingly have done just that. The 

Act of Dec. 8, 1919, Pub. L. No. 66-102, 41 Stat. 368, gave 

the President authority to give authors publishing works 

abroad during World War I time to comply with procedural 

formalities in the United States after the war’s end. Similarly, 

the Act of Sept. 25, 1941, Pub. L. No. 77-258, 55 Stat. 732, 

gave the President authority to make copyright protection 

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available to authors who might have been temporarily unable 

to comply with required formalities because of disruption or 

suspension of needed facilities. Plaintiffs urge that these acts 

simply extended the time limits for filing and that they do not 

purport to modify the prohibition on removing works from the 

public domain. But to the extent that potential copyright 

holders failed to satisfy procedural requirements, such works 

would necessarily have already entered the public domain at 

the time the statutes were passed. 

Plaintiffs also invoke a dictum in Graham v. John Deere 

Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966): “Congress may not authorize the 

issuance of patents whose effects are to remove existent 

knowledge from the public domain, or to restrict free access to 

materials already available.” Id. at 6. Several factors weaken 

the dictum’s force. First, the case dealt with patents rather 

than copyright, and ideas applicable to one don’t 

automatically apply to the other. For example, the Eldred 

Court saw the “quid pro quo” idea as having a special force in 

patent law, where the patentee, in exchange for exclusive 

rights, must disclose his “discoveries” against his presumed 

will. 537 U.S. at 216-17. In contrast, the author is eager to 

disclose her work. Id. 

Second, the Eldred Court itself weakened any inference 

that might be drawn from the Graham dictum, using patent 

cases as a basis for upholding the extension of existing 

copyrights. Discussing McClurg v. Kingsland, 42 U.S. 202 

(1843), the Court said that the 

patentee in that case was unprotected under the law in 

force when the patent issued because he had allowed his 

employer briefly to practice the invention before he 

obtained the patent. Only upon enactment, two years 

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later, of an exemption for such allowances did the patent 

become valid, retroactive to the time it issued. 

Eldred, 537 U.S. at 203. On this view, McClurg upheld the 

creation of patent protection for an invention that had lapsed 

into the public domain at least two years earlier. Plaintiffs 

insist that the Eldred Court misread McClurg, and that its 

characterization was mere dictum anyway. See Plaintiffs’ 

Reply Br. at 14. While McClurg strikes us as one of the most 

opaque decisions ever crafted, so that we can hardly rule out 

the possibility of a Supreme Court misreading, we do not see 

the sort of smoking gun that might embolden us, as an 

“inferior” federal court (U.S. Const., art. III, § 1), to substitute 

our judgment for the Court’s discussion, now but two years 

old. Certainly we are not persuaded that McClurg 

“implicitly” agrees with plaintiffs “that Congress may not 

grant patents over matters in the public domain.” See 

Plaintiffs’ Reply Br. at 13. 

* * * 

The decision of the district court is 

 Affirmed. 

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