Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/11pdf/10-545.pdf
Page Number: 31.0

Cite as:  565 U. S. ____ (2012) 

27 

Opinion of the Court 

public domain.32  Neither this challenge nor that raised in 
Eldred,  we  stress,  allege  Congress  transgressed  a  gener-
ally  applicable  First  Amendment  prohibition;  we  are  not 
faced,  for  example,  with  copyright  protection  that  hinges
on the author’s viewpoint.

The  Tenth  Circuit’s  initial  opinion  determined  that 
petitioners  marshaled  a  stronger  First  Amendment  chal-
lenge  than  did  their  predecessors  in  Eldred,  who  never 
“possessed unfettered access to any of the works at issue.”
501 F. 3d, at 1193.  See also id., at 1194 (“[O]nce the works
at  issue  became  free  for  anyone  to  copy,  [petitioners]  had 
vested  First  Amendment  interests  in  the  expressions,
[thus]  §514’s  interference  with  [petitioners’]  rights  is 
subject to First Amendment scrutiny.”).  As petitioners put
it  in  this  Court,  Congress  impermissibly  revoked  their 
right to exploit foreign works that “belonged to them” once 
the works were in the public domain.  Brief for Petitioners 
44–45. 

To  copyright  lawyers,  the  “vested  rights”  formulation 

—————— 

32 “[R]equir[ing]  works  that  have  already  fallen  into  the  public  do-
main  to  stay  there”  might,  as  the  dissent  asserts,  supply  an  “easily
administrable  standard.”    Post,  at  14.  However  attractive  this  bright-
line  rule  might  be,  it  is  not  a  rule  rooted  in  the  constitutional  text  or
history.  Nor  can  it  fairly  be  gleaned  from  our  case  law.    The  dissent 
cites  three  decisions  to  document  its  assertion  that  “this  Court  has 
assumed the particular importance of public domain material in rough-
ly  analogous  circumstances.”  Post,  at  15.  The  dictum  in  Graham  v. 
John Deere Co. of Kansas City, 383 U. S. 1, 6 (1966), noted earlier, did
not  treat  the  public  domain  as  a  constitutional  limit—certainly  not
under the rubric of the First Amendment.  See supra, at 19.  The other 
two  decisions  the  dissent  cites  considered  whether  the  federal  Patent 
Act  preempted  a  state  trade-secret  law,  Kewanee  Oil  Co.  v.  Bicron 
Corp.,  416  U. S.  470,  479–484  (1974),  and  whether  the  freedom  of  the 
press  shielded  reporters  from  liability  for  publishing  material  drawn
from public court documents, Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U. S. 
469, 495–497 (1975).  Neither decision remotely ascribed constitutional
significance to a work’s public domain status.