In Tuesday’s (3/22) New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case which “asks whether Congress acted constitutionally in 1994 by restoring copyrights in foreign works that had belonged to the public, including films by Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini, books by C. S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, symphonies by Prokofiev and Stravinsky and paintings by Picasso, including ‘Guernica.’ … The plaintiffs in the new case, Golan v. Holder, are orchestra conductors, teachers and film archivists who say they had relied for years on the free availability of works in the public domain that they had performed, adapted and distributed. … Lawrence Golan, the lead plaintiff, teaches conducting at the University of Denver and is the music director and conductor of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra in Washington State. He said the 1994 law made it very difficult for smaller orchestras to play some seminal 20th-century works that had once been a standard part of their repertories. … He said he had no quarrel with providing financial incentives to people who create art. ‘Obviously, current composers need to be encouraged to create their works, and they should be getting royalties,’ Mr. Golan said. But he said withdrawing works from the public domain did great harm to the cultural life of small communities for no good reason.”
Posted March 23, 2011
