Wheaton and Donaldson v. Peters and Grigg
The Court ruled that there is no federal common law of copyright and, after finding no evidence that Pennsylvania had adopted a common-law copyright rule of its own, held that an author's rights come only from Congress's copyright statutes. Because the case turned on disputed facts about whether the reporter had completed every step those statutes required, the Court sent the case back for a jury to decide.
The decision meant that copyright in the United States is entirely a creature of legislation, not an inherent common-law property right, and that authors must strictly follow every formality Congress imposes -- recording the title, publishing notice, and depositing a copy -- or lose protection altogether.
“no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this court; and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right”
The Court's unanimous statement that no one can hold copyright in the Court's own judicial opinions.
How it got here: A federal circuit court in Pennsylvania ruled against the reporter's copyright claim, and he brought the case to the Supreme Court on appeal.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Henry Wheaton served as the Supreme Court's official reporter and published multiple volumes of the Court's decisions, known as Wheaton's Reports. Richard Peters succeeded him as reporter and later published a condensed edition covering many of the same early volumes. Wheaton and his publishing partner sued Peters and his publisher, claiming an exclusive, permanent property right in the reports under common law and under the federal copyright statutes.
The question before the Court
Could the Supreme Court's official reporter claim a permanent, common-law copyright in his published volumes, or did his rights depend entirely on following every step required by federal copyright law?
Why it matters
This ruling became the foundation of American copyright law: because no copyright exists until an author complies with the statute's formalities, publishers, authors, and later courts had clear notice that skipping any required step -- filing, notice, or deposit -- could forfeit legal protection, shaping how creators secured rights for the next century.
What changes now
The case returns to the circuit court, where a jury must determine, for each volume of Wheaton's Reports, whether the newspaper-notice and Secretary of State deposit requirements were actually satisfied. Only after that factual finding can the lower court decide whether Wheaton's copyright was ever valid and, if so, whether Peters's condensed reports infringed it. This is a final ruling on the legal question of what copyright requires, even though factual questions remain for further proceedings.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Peters actually infringed Wheaton's rights -- that depends on facts still to be found by a jury. The Court also did not resolve whether the act of 1802 added its own requirements to the act of 1790, since the justices were evenly divided on that specific point. It did state clearly, however, that no reporter can hold copyright in the Court's own written opinions.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Thompson
“If there be a common law right, there certainly must be a common law remedy.”Thompson's argument that a pre-existing common-law copyright would carry its own enforceable remedy.
Justice Thompson argued that English common law had long recognized a perpetual property right of authors in their works even before the Statute of Anne, and that this right was carried into Pennsylvania by early settlers and never displaced by that English statute, which never applied there. He read the 1790 and 1802 acts as merely adding cumulative statutory remedies and penalties on top of this pre-existing common-law right, not as creating copyright from scratch or making every formality a strict precondition to any protection. He would have held that Wheaton's common-law right alone entitled him to relief, reversed the lower decree, made the injunction permanent, and ordered an accounting without sending any issue to a jury.
Dissent — Justice Baldwin
Justice Baldwin dissented from the Court's opinion as well, though no separate written opinion explaining his reasoning is included in the reported decision.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first asked whether authors have a permanent property right in their published works simply by common law, independent of any statute -- noting that even English judges had split sharply on this question before Parliament's Statute of Anne settled it there.
- Because there is no single federal common law, the Court said any common-law copyright claim had to be grounded in the law of the state where the dispute arose -- here, Pennsylvania -- and it found no evidence that Pennsylvania courts, customs, or legislation had ever recognized such a right.
- Turning to the Constitution's Copyright Clause and the 1790 and 1802 copyright statutes, the Court read the statutory language ('shall have the sole right') as creating a new right rather than merely protecting one that already existed, since Congress would not need to grant something the common law already provided.
- Having concluded that copyright exists only by statute, the Court held that every requirement Congress imposed -- recording the title with the clerk, publishing notice in a newspaper, and depositing a copy with the Secretary of State -- was equally essential to a valid copyright, not a minor afterthought that could be excused.
- Applying this rule, the Court found it could not yet tell from the record whether Wheaton had actually completed the newspaper-notice and deposit requirements for each volume, so it sent the case back for a jury to determine, volume by volume, whether those steps had been performed.