admin On Monday, a strong decision was delivered by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was against a filmmaker, who filmed the documentary of the recovery of an infamous English pirate Blackbeard’s wrecked ship. The main reason the case went against him was the fact that he refused to revive his video piracy lawsuit which got financial damages from North Carolina.
A lower court in 2018 ruled that the state was protected by a law called sovereign immunity and the state had the rights to file a case on an individual for copyright violation. The copyrights were violated when Frederick Allen’s images were used online.
Allen went for the federal court in 2015 to file the case against for the breach of copyrights act where five of his videos and a photograph of salvage operation for the factually and archaeologically important ship, the Queen Anne’s revenge, which sailed and drowned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Beaufort in 1718, North Carolina.
While speaking to the reporters, he said that he was upset with the court hearing’s result and he with his company, Nautilus Productions, would evaluate its options.
“The state of North Carolina routinely and vigorously enforces its own copyrights, yet simultaneously hides behind sovereign immunity when it violates the intellectual property rights of its own citizens,” Allen said.
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said he was pleased with the ruling. “The court unanimously upheld longstanding precedents recognizing that all states retain certain core aspects of sovereignty, including sovereign immunity from copyright lawsuits,” Stein said.
The case was heard based on whether the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act, accepted by the U.S. lawmakers in the year 1990 to allow states to be held liable of illegally copying filmmaker’s productions, was valid.
Source: reuters.com
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