Golan v. Holder

To comply with the Berne Convention's international copyright standards after the U.S. joined in 1989, Congress enacted section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, granting full domestic copyright protection to foreign works still protected abroad that would have been protected in the U.S. all along had the Berne Convention's principles applied at the time of authorship -- including works previously freely available in the U.S. public domain; the law barred retroactive compensation claims but let copyright owners seek compensation for future use, while also providing grace periods and other accommodations for parties who had relied on the works' prior public-domain status. Parties who had benefited from that free use (plaintiffs) sued, arguing section 514 violated the Copyright Clause and First Amendment by removing works from the public domain, and the case reached the Supreme Court.