Cinema Studies prof. writes brief for Supreme Court

Video: Peter Decherney gives his take on Golan v. Holder. (Courtesy of University Communications)

Picasso’s Guernica, Shostakovitch’s compositions and Pippi Longstocking — these are just a few of the potentially millions of world-famous works that may soon be off-limits to public use after the Supreme Court case Golan v. Holder, which goes to trial this Wednesday.

Cinema Studies professor Peter Decherney, author of the forthcoming book Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: from Edison to the Internet, was called on this summer to offer his expert opinion in the high-profile case. Decherney wrote an amicus brief explaining why keeping more works in the public domain is actually beneficial for the film industry, in response to a brief by the Motion Picture Association of America on behalf of Hollywood arguing in favor of expanding copyright status and restricting the public domain.

Decherney’s brief was filed over the summer and read by the Supreme Court justices, and on Wednesday it will be argued over in front of the Supreme Court by the two parties’ lawyers.

The lead petitioner in Golan v. Holder is a composer who believes that the restriction of public domain has negatively affected his career by making the Russian masterpieces typically performed by his orchestra unaffordable. Currently, the public domain includes any works made in America before 1923, and those that authors willingly placed in the public domain or did not register.

The case is a response to the 1994 Congressional Act that re-copyrighted a number of foreign works that had been in the public domain. The act created a number of “orphan works” whose copyright holders are unidentifiedand raised questions about whether Congress can “go too far [by] changing the ‘contours’ of the copyright system,” Decherney said.

According to Decherney, “Hollywood has benefited more from public domain than any other industry,” drawing on popular tales and historical events at “times when the industry is in trouble or is trying to expand into new artistic or technical directions.” The case reflects Hollywood’s “dual position of wanting freedom to build on others’ works” as well as “control [over] the products it creates,” Decherney said.

Decherney believes the outcome of the case will have a large cultural impact, as the use of public domain concepts — such as producing a screenplay using familiar characters or creating a painting based on a famous story — is important for artists who wish to enter these industries, making it a “great engine of commerce and art.”

College sophomore Gary Kafer, who worked with Decherney through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program this summer, was originally supposed to help Decherney with a project related to YouTube. When Decherney was asked to write the amicus brief, Kafer contributed to the appendices of the brief by researching and compiling a list of the top 10 highest-grossing movies based on public domain source material, as well as a list of American films and television productions that were inspired by or adapted from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Kafer found it “interesting to see how [quickly] we had to meet the deadline — the entire brief was prepared within a couple of weeks.”

“It’s unfortunate that a lot of people don’t realize how important this case is … I will definitely be in touch [with Decherney] to discuss the outcome,” he added.

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