Wednesday's Supreme Court Action

WASHINGTON (AP) — A roundup of what's happening on Wednesday inside of the Supreme Court.

Court lets telemarketers be sued in federal court

The Supreme Court says people who get unwanted calls from telemarketers and other businesses can sue in federal as well as state courts.

The high court ruling on Wednesday involves a lawsuit claiming a debt collector used repeated recorded calls.

Marcus Mims said he was getting repeated phone calls from Arrow Financial Services, LLC, trying to collect a student loan debt for Sallie Mae. His lawsuit was thrown out by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said that Congress did not explicitly give permission for federal lawsuits in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Other federal courts ruled differently and let lawsuits move forward.

The high court said in a unanimous opinion that it would allow federal lawsuits against telemarketers.

Supreme Court upholds copyright law

The Supreme Court upheld a law Wednesday giving U.S. copyright protection to paintings by Pablo Picasso, films of Alfred Hitchcock, music from Igor Stravinsky and millions of other works by foreign artists that had been freely available.

The justices said in a 6-2 decision Wednesday that Congress acted within its power when it extended protection to works that had been in the public domain. The law's challengers complained that community orchestras, academics and others who rely on works that are available for free have effectively been priced out of performing "Peter and the Wolf" and other pieces that had been mainstays of their repertoires.

The case concerned a 1994 law that was intended to bring the U.S. into compliance with an international treaty on intellectual property. Without it, American artists might have found it hard to protect their work in certain countries that lacked specific copyright arrangements with the United States.

The law requires people to ask permission or pay royalties before copying, playing or republishing foreign works that previously could not have been copyrighted in the United States.

The court ruled in 2003 that Congress may extend the life of a copyright. Wednesday's decision was the first time it said that published works lacking a copyright could later be protected.

"Neither congressional practice nor our decisions treat the public domain, in any and all cases, as untouchable by copyright legislation. The First Amendment likewise provides no exceptional solicitude for works in the public domain," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her opinion for the court.

But Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for himself and Justice Samuel Alito, said that an important purpose of a copyright is to encourage an author or artist to produce new work. "The statute before us, however, does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work. By definition, it bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works," Breyer said.

Justice Elena Kagan did not take part in the case because she worked on it while serving in the Justice Department.

The case is Golan v. Holder, 10-545.

Court orders new hearing for Ala. death row inmate

An Alabama death row inmate deserves a new court hearing because his lawyers at a top-flight New York firm abandoned him, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a case one justice called "a veritable perfect storm of misfortune."

The court voted 7-2 to reverse a federal appeals court ruling that cut off appeals for Cory Maples, who was convicted of killing two men execution-style in 1995. Maples missed a deadline to appeal when court notices to his lawyers at the Sullivan and Cromwell firm were returned unopened and a local court clerk took no further action. The lawyers at the prominent New York firm had been representing Maples without charge.

Deadlines usually are sacrosanct at the high court, where defendants also typically are held responsible for the mistakes of their lawyers.

But Maples' case is different because he is facing execution and his lawyers didn't simply err, they abandoned him, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her majority opinion.

"Through no fault of his own, Maples, an inmate on death row, was left unrepresented at a critical time," Ginsburg said in an opinion that also criticized Alabama for using inexperienced lawyers and paying them poorly to represent defendants in death penalty cases.

But Justice Samuel Alito, who often votes against criminal defendants, said in a separate opinion that Maples' circumstances were unique. "What occurred here was not a predictable consequence of the Alabama system, but a veritable perfect storm of misfortune," Alito said

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Scalia said the court should have stuck with its usual practice of holding defendants responsible for their lawyers' mistakes. "One suspects that today's decision is motivated in large part by an understandable sense of frustration" with Alabama's refusal to waive its deadlines in this case, Scalia said in an opinion joined by