Supreme Court to hear pirate ship case

The justices said Monday they will hear arguments in the fall in a copyright case involving the pirate Blackbeard’s sunken ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, which was discovered off North Carolina’s coast in 1996.

The case pits the state of North Carolina against a company that has documented the ship’s recovery. The ship is the property of the state, but under an agreement, North Carolina-based Nautilus Productions has for nearly two decades documented the ship's salvage. In the process, the company and copyrighted photos and videos of the ship.

In 2013, the state and Nautilus resolved one copyright dispute over photos the state posted on the website of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, which oversees the ship’s recovery and preservation. The sides reached a settlement agreement in which neither side admitted wrongdoing. But Nautilus later sued after the state posted a handful of Nautilus videos on a state YouTube channel and used a photo in a newsletter.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge was originally a French ship when Blackbeard, the Englishman Edward Teach, captured the vessel in the fall of 1717. He armed the ship with 40 cannons and made it his flagship.

The following year, Blackbeard was sailing north from Charleston, South Carolina, when the ship went aground in what's now called Beaufort Inlet. Blackbeard abandoned the ship. Five months later, members of the Royal Navy of Virginia killed Blackbeard at Ocracoke Inlet.

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/06/03/supreme-court-to-hear-pirate-ship-case/