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Supreme Court To Hear Case Over NC's Use Of Pirate Ship Images

88.5 WFDD - Public Radio For The Piedmont | By Paul Garber
Published June 3, 2019 at 4:30 PM EDT
In this Monday, March 3, 1997 file picture, a replica of the ship "Queen Anne's Revenge" rests on a stage in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Karen Tam)

 

The U.S. Supreme Court will take on a case involving the state of North Carolina and a video production company.

The Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground off the coast of North Carolina just over 300 years ago.

The wreckage was discovered in 1996, and a company called Nautilus Productions has spent years documenting the ship's salvage.

Now the state and the company are in a copyright suit. Nautilus Productions sued over photos and videos that were used on North Carolina's YouTube channel and in a newsletter.

A trial court had previously allowed the case to go forward, but an appeals court dismissed it. Now it's up to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the lawsuit can proceed.
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Courts North CarolinablackbeardpiratescopyrightUS Supreme Court
Paul Garber
Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.
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