A state cannot be sued for copyright infringement, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Allen v. Cooper. The opinion held that Congress did not validly abrogate state sovereign immunity when it enacted the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990.

The dispute in Allen arose out of the state of North Carolina’s use of photographer and videographer Frederick Allen’s copyrighted photos and videos of the shipwreck of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Originally serving as a French slave ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge is better known as briefly serving as the flagship of the famed pirate Blackbeard. The ship sank in 1718 after hitting a sandbar off the coast of Beaufort, North Carolina.

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