Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Act of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions.
Greer County is a county located along the southwest border of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. As of the 2020 census, the population was 5,491. Its county seat is Mangum. From 1860 to 1896, the state of Texas claimed an area known as Greer County, Texas, which included present-day Greer County along with neighboring areas. In 1896 it was designated as a county in Oklahoma Territory under a ruling by the US Supreme Court. The rural Greer County is home to Quartz Mountain State Park, near the community of Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. It is also home to the Oklahoma State Reformatory, located in Granite. Its population has declined since 1930 due to changes in agriculture and migration to cities for work.
Sanborn maps are detailed maps of U.S. cities and towns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Originally published by The Sanborn Map Company (Sanborn), the maps were created to allow fire insurance companies to assess their total liability in urbanized areas of the United States. Since they contain detailed information about properties and individual buildings in approximately 12,000 U.S. cities and towns, Sanborn maps are valuable for documenting changes in the built environment of American cities over many decades.
Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that upheld the power of Congress to extend copyright protection to photography.
Statutory interpretation is the process by which courts interpret and apply legislation. Some amount of interpretation is often necessary when a case involves a statute. Sometimes the words of a statute have a plain and a straightforward meaning. But in many cases, there is some ambiguity in the words of the statute that must be resolved by the judge. To find the meanings of statutes, judges use various tools and methods of statutory interpretation, including traditional canons of statutory interpretation, legislative history, and purpose. In common law jurisdictions, the judiciary may apply rules of statutory interpretation both to legislation enacted by the legislature and to delegated legislation such as administrative agency regulations.
Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1879), is a leading Supreme Court of the United States copyright case cited to explain the idea-expression dichotomy. The court held that a book did not give an author the right to exclude others from practicing what was described in the book, only right to exclude reproduction of the material in the book. Exclusive rights to a "useful art" described in a book was only available by patent.
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289 (2001), is a United States Supreme Court case involving habeas corpus and INA § 212(c) relief for deportable aliens.
Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that held, "Unless restrained by their own constitutions, state legislatures may enact statutes to control and regulate all organizations, drilling, and parading of military bodies and associations except those which are authorized by the militia laws of the United States." It states that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution limited only the power of Congress and the national government to control firearms, not that of the states, and that the right to peaceably assemble in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution was not protected by the clause referred to except to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This decision was overruled in McDonald v. City of Chicago in (2010).
Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1879), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court affirmed the judgment of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Utah in stating that execution by firing squad, as prescribed by the Utah territorial statute, was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.
The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1929, are in the public domain.
The Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82 (1879), were a set of three cases consolidated into a single appeal before the United States Supreme Court, which in 1879 unanimously ruled that the Copyright Clause of the Constitution gave Congress no power to protect or regulate trademarks. Congress then passed the Trade Mark Act of 1881, which was based on the Commerce Clause power, and therefore passed constitutional muster.
Riverside County is a county located in the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 2,418,185, making it the fourth-most populous county in California and the 10th-most populous in the United States. The name was derived from the city of Riverside, which is the county seat.
Gerrymandering is the practice of setting boundaries of electoral districts to favor specific political interests within legislative bodies, often resulting in districts with convoluted, winding boundaries rather than compact areas. The term "gerrymandering" was coined after a review of Massachusetts's redistricting maps of 1812 set by Governor Elbridge Gerry noted that one of the districts looked like a mythical salamander.
Merrell v. Tice, 104 U.S. 557 (1881), was a United States Supreme Court ruling dealing with copyright. At the time, a prerequisite for having a copyright was delivering two copies of the material to the Library of Congress within a time limit. Tice sued Merrell for copyright infringement and the lower courts were sympathetic; he just had to prove that he had observed that prerequisite. As evidence, Tice presented notes purportedly from the Library of Congress that certified that he had sent the book to the Library on time. Appeals of the case eventually landed it in the Supreme Court.
The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 is a United States law that establishes a small claims court–type system within the United States Copyright Office, known as the Copyright Claims Board, for copyright owners to seek damages under US$30,000 for copyright violations.
Ernst Emil Julius Ferdinand Hexamer was a German-born American civil engineer. He was known as originator of a system of fire insurance maps, which by the time of his death were used by fire insurance companies in all parts of the world.
