By Christopher Jon Sprigman

On Wednesday thousands of scholars joined millions of people around the world in online protest of two proposed laws, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). SOPA and PIPA would, in the view of many observers, authorize wide-ranging online censorship in the guise of stopping copyright infringement. So far, the protest appears to have been a success: Congressional support for the proposed laws is crumbling.

On that same day, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in a copyright case that may be just as important as SOPA and PIPA—and potentially just as harmful to the interests of scholars, librarians, and archivists. In Golan v. Holder, a group of conductors, educators, film distributors, and others challenged the constitutionality of Congress's decision in 1994 to remove millions of books, films, songs, and other creative works, mostly foreign, from the public domain and "restore" their copyrights. It did so to conform to an international agreement, although it is far from clear that the move was required to put the United States in conformity. Some of the works taken from the public domain and put back under copyright are very famous; they include Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," the symphonies of Shostakovich, Picasso's "Guernica," and the English films of Alfred Hitchcock.