List of United States Supreme Court copyright case law


This is a list of Supreme Court of the United States cases in the area of copyright law. In the United States Constitution, the Copyright Clause in Article 1, Section 8 endows Congress with the power to create a copyright system. To avoid individual states' attempts at creating their own copyright systems, Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1790, based on Great Britain's Statute of Anne. Over the decades since, copyright in the United States has become a more complicated system with longer terms and more tests, and has been the subject of many decisions by the Court.
The Supreme Court was the source of a number of concepts in the field, including fair use, the idea-expression divide, the useful articles or separability doctrine, and the uncopyrightability of federal documents.
This list is a list solely of United States Supreme Court decisions about applying copyright law. Not all Supreme Court decisions are ultimately influential and, as in other fields, not all important decisions are made at the Supreme Court level. Many federal courts issue rulings that are significant or come to be influential, but those are outside the scope of this list.
Because they share a clause of the Constitution and much the same justifications, there is considerable overlap between patent and copyright jurisprudence. As such, patent cases may appear in this list if they make their connections to copyright explicit in the opinions.

19th Century

20th Century

21st Century

Dissents to denials of ''certiorari''

When the Court refuses to hear a case, justices are entitled to write dissents to that denial of certiorari.
CaseCitationYearSubject MatterDissenterStatute InterpretedQuestionDissent Reason
Lee v. Runge1971Copyrightability,
Idea-expression divide		DouglasCopyright ClauseBecause Congress's power to create copyright and patent laws both come from the Copyright Clause, should they not both be judged by the same standard? Lee argued that the standard should be patents' "novelty" rather than copyright's "originality."Many of the interests of copyrights and patent overlap, and the part of Copyright Clause specifying that Congress's laws must "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is a limit on Congress's authority.
Data General Corp. v. Digidyne Corp.1985Antitrust, TyingWhite, BlackmunClayton Antitrust Act of 1914What constitutes forcing power in the absence of a large share of the general market? Must market power over "locked in" customers be analyzed at the outset of the original decision to purchase? What effect should be given to the existence of a copyright or other legal monopoly in determining market power?The situation raised a number of complexities in the issue of whether tying software and hardware using copyrights or patents is anti-competitive, and the precedents set by the lower court were based on specious details. For example, a lower court had essentially said flatly that tying arrangements were anti-competitive, but the Supreme Court had ruled otherwise in cases like Jefferson Parish Hospital District No. 2 v. Hyde. The issue was likely to become more important as the multi-billion dollar computer industry continued to grow, so it was better to address the problems sooner rather than later.
Harper v. Maverick Recording Co.2010Copyright infringementAlitoCopyright Act of 1976,
Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988		Should the "inadvertent innocent infringer" defense to copyright infringement be eliminated for all Internet music downloading?The "innocent infringer" defense, which lowers statutory minimum damages of copyright infringement from $750 to $200, was written in a time when copyright notices would be clearly affixed to physical media, which was part of the expectation in favor of the defense. A digital music MP3 file could not bear a human-readable copyright notice, so there was a strong argument for the defense. Moreover, the lower courts declined to take mitigating factors such as the 16-year-old Harper's age into consideration, and perhaps they should have.

Further research