Stephen Zralek on U.S. Supreme Court Copyright Decision for International IP Publication
Bone McAllester Norton attorney Stephen Zralek discusses the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick on copyright owners for Managing IP, a highly respected intellectual property publication in the global IP community. The article by Eileen McDermott, “Supreme Court takes narrow approach to copyright registration,” appeared in the March 5, 2010 online Weekly News edition.
As Stephen explains in the article, the decision handed down on March 2 has a significant impact on every copyright owner across the nation, not just those parties in that particular case. Without any analysis, the Supreme Court adopted the narrow approach to copyright registration, meaning that any U.S. holders of copyright must first have their registration accepted or rejected by the Copyright Office before initiating a lawsuit for infringement. Prior to this decision, there had been a split among the various circuits in the U.S. In his role as vice chair of the American Bar Association's Copyright Litigation Committee, Stephen helped lead a team that has proposed Congress amend the Copyright Act to adopt the broad approach. The broad approach would allow copyright owners to initiate infringement suits as soon as they apply to register their works, putting them on equal footing with foreign holders of copyrights who seek to enforce their rights here. Read more about these issues at Stephen's blog, TheExpressive.
