[tubemonkey]

It was a just ruling.

The case, Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545, considered a 1994 law enacted to carry out an international convention. The law applied mainly to works first published abroad from 1923 to 1989 that had earlier not been eligible for copyright protection under American law, including films by Alfred Hitchcock, books by C. S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, symphonies by Prokofiev and Stravinsky and paintings by Picasso

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said the law had merely put “foreign works on an equal footing with their U.S. counterparts.”

“Assuming a foreign and domestic author died the same day, their works will enter the public domain simultaneously,” she wrote.

She gave examples. “Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ could once be performed free of charge,” while now, she said: “The right to perform it must be obtained in the marketplace. This is the same marketplace, 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.”

Indeed, she said, foreign works not eligible to be copyrighted in the United States before the 1994 law are somewhat worse off, as they receive “no compensatory time” for the period they had been in the public domain.