Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/11pdf/10-545.pdf
Page Number: 34.0

30 

GOLAN v. HOLDER 

Opinion of the Court 

cost.  By fully implementing Berne, Congress ensured that
most  works,  whether  foreign  or  domestic,  would  be  gov-
erned  by  the  same  legal  regime.    The  phenomenon  to
which  Congress  responded  is  not  new:  Distortions  of  the 
same  order  occurred  with  greater  frequency—and  to  the
detriment  of  both  foreign  and  domestic  authors—when, 
before  1891,  foreign  works  were  excluded  entirely  from 
U. S.  copyright  protection.  See  Kampelman,  The  United
States and International Copyright, 41 Am. J. Int’l L. 406, 
413  (1947)  (“American  readers  were  less  inclined  to  read 
the novels of Cooper or Hawthorne for a dollar when they 
could  buy  a  novel  of  Scott  or  Dickens  for  a  quarter.”).
Section  514  continued  the  trend  toward  a  harmonized 
copyright  regime  by  placing  foreign  works  in  the  position 
they  would  have  occupied  if  the  current  regime  had  been 
in  effect  when  those  works  were  created  and  first  pub-
lished.  Authors once deprived of protection are spared the
continuing  effects  of  that  initial  deprivation;  §514  gives
them nothing more than the benefit of their labors during 
whatever  time  remains  before  the  normal  copyright  term
expires.35 

Unlike  petitioners,  the  dissent  makes  much  of  the  so-
called “orphan works” problem.  See post, at 11–14, 23–24. 
We  readily  acknowledge  the  difficulties  would-be  users  of
copyrightable materials may face in identifying or locating 
copyright  owners.    See  generally  U. S.  Copyright  Office, 
Report on Orphan Works 21–40 (2006).  But as the dissent 
concedes,  see  post,  at  13,  this  difficulty  is  hardly  peculiar 
to  works  restored  under  §514.    It  similarly  afflicts,  for 

—————— 

35 Persistently  deploring  “ ‘restored  copyright’  protection  [because  it] 
removes material from the public domain,” post, at 14, the dissent does 
not pause to consider when and why the material came to be lodged in
that domain.  Most of the works affected by §514 got there after a term
of zero or a term cut short by failure to observe U. S. formalities.  See 
supra, at 9.