Wheaton v. Peters
United States Supreme Court case
Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (8 Pet.) 591 (1834), was the first United States Supreme Court ruling on copyright. The case upheld the power of Congress to make a grant of copyright protection subject to conditions and rejected the doctrine of a common law copyright in published works. The Court also declared that there could be no copyright in the Court's own judicial decisions.
Facts
The case arose out of the printing of the Supreme Court's own opinions. Henry Wheaton, the third reporter of decisions, had compiled the opinions of the Court, complete with annotations and summaries of the arguments in Court. This was useful material but made the volumes of his reports costly and out of the reach of most lawyers. His successor as reporter, Richard Peters, in addition to publishing the current volumes of reports, had gone over his predecessor's work, eliminated the arguments of counsel and other material beyond the opinions themselves, and published an abridged edition reducing twenty-four volumes into six. The Reporter's salary of $1,000 per year did not cover the full expenses of preparing the reports, and the Reporters relied on sales of their books to recoup their costs. By creating more affordable volumes, Peters devastated the market for Wheaton's more expensive ones.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wheaton v. Peters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.