• Blog Post

    SCOTUS Approves State Piracy Without Consequence in North Carolina’s Blackbeard Lawsuit

    In 1718, decades before the Founding Fathers quarreled over State’s rights versus Federal rights, Blackbeard’s infamous Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground off the coast of Beaufort, North Carolina.  Nearly 300 years later, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled that all States enjoy sovereign immunity from copyright lawsuits. In June 2019, we published a blog post detailing the lawsuit between Nautilus Productions, LLC (“Nautilus”) and the State of North Carolina.  When the wreckage of Queen Anne’s Revenge was discovered in 1996, Intersal, Inc. (“Intersal”), a private research and salvage company, conducted the exploration and recovery of the ship’s artifacts.  Interstal hired Nautilus to document its efforts over the…