Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/11pdf/10-545.pdf
Page Number: 33.0

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

29 

Opinion of the Court 

Section 514, we add, does not impose a blanket prohibi-
tion on public access.  Petitioners protest that fair use and
the  idea/expression  dichotomy  “are  plainly  inadequate  to
protect the speech and expression rights that Section 514 
took  from  petitioners,  or  . . .  the  public”—that  is,  “the 
unrestricted  right  to  perform,  copy,  teach  and  distribute 
the entire work, for any reason.”  Brief for Petitioners 46– 
47. 
“Playing  a  few  bars  of  a  Shostakovich  symphony,” 
petitioners  observe,  “is  no  substitute  for  performing  the 
entire work.”  Id., at 47.34 

But Congress has not put petitioners in this bind.  The 
question  here,  as  in  Eldred,  is  whether  would-be  users 
must  pay  for  their  desired  use  of the  author’s  expression, 
or  else  limit  their  exploitation  to  “fair  use”  of  that  work.
Prokofiev’s  Peter  and  the  Wolf  could  once  be  performed 
free  of  charge;  after  §514  the  right  to  perform  it  must  be
obtained  in  the  marketplace.    This  is  the  same  market-
place,  of  course,  that  exists  for  the  music  of  Prokofiev’s 
U. S. contemporaries: works of Copland and Bernstein, for
example, that enjoy copyright protection, but nevertheless 
appear regularly in the programs of U. S. concertgoers.

Before  we  joined  Berne,  domestic  works  and  some  for-
eign works were protected under U. S. statutes and bilat-
eral  international  agreements,  while  other  foreign  works
were available at an artificially low (because royalty-free) 

—————— 

public.  See URAA Joint Hearing 3 (statement of Rep. Hughes); id., at 
121 (app. to statement of Lehman, Commerce Dept.); id., at 141 (state-
ment of Shapiro, USTR); id., at 145 (statement of Christopher Schroe-
der, DOJ).  The reliance-party protections supplied by §514, see supra,
at  10–11,  were  meant  to  address  such  concerns.    See  URAA  Joint 
Hearing 148–149 (prepared statement of Schroeder). 

34 Because Shostakovich was a pre-1973 Russian composer, his works
were  not  protected  in  the  United  States.    See  U. S.  Copyright  Office, 
Circular No. 38A: The International Copyright Relations of the United
States 9, 11, n. 2 (2010) (copyright relations between the Soviet Union
and the United States date to 1973).