The justices of the Supreme Court seemed sympathetic to videographer Frederick Allen, whose attorney argued that North Carolina unfairly deprived him of his intellectual property rights by publishing without permission the images he made of the salvaging of a pirate ship that was owned by the pirate Blackbeard.
Blackbeard, also known as Edward Teach, was an English privateer and pirate who died in 1718. His 40-gun flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, conducted raids along the coasts of Virginia and the Carolinas. Coincidentally, English law, the forerunner of American law, first recognized copyrights in 1710, during the reign of Queen Anne. Blackbeard’s much-storied buried treasure—assuming it existed—has never been located, but the wreckage of the ship was discovered in 1996.
