• Christina Burnham holds pirate-themed flags in front of the Supreme Court in Washington NTuesday in support of her uncle, Frederick Allen, a filmmaker whose appeal in a copyright lawsuit over the use of his footage of Blackbeard's shipwreck is being heard by the justices. | REUTERS
    Christina Burnham holds pirate-themed flags in front of the Supreme Court in Washington NTuesday in support of her uncle, Frederick Allen, a filmmaker whose appeal in a copyright lawsuit over the use of his footage of Blackbeard's shipwreck is being heard by the justices. | REUTERS

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WASHINGTON – U.S. Supreme Court justices struggled to navigate between the rights of states and individuals on Tuesday as they weighed a documentary filmmaker’s bid to revive his lawsuit against North Carolina state officials he accuses of unlawfully pirating his footage of notorious English pirate Blackbeard’s wrecked ship.

The justices heard an hour of arguments in the appeal by the filmmaker, Frederick Allen, of a lower court’s ruling that North Carolina could not be sued under federal law for allegedly infringing his copyrights on five videos and a photo of the salvage operation for the ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which went down in 1718.

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