WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday revived a copyright lawsuit against the owners of “Raging Bull,” the acclaimed 1980 movie for which Robert De Niro won an Academy Award as best actor for his portrayal of the boxer Jake LaMotta.  The case arose from a 1963 screenplay written by Frank Petrella in collaboration with Mr. LaMotta. Mr. Petrella died in 1981, and his daughter Paula inherited the rights to the screenplay.  She did not sue the movie’s owners until 2009, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said that was too late. The copyright law itself would have allowed the suit, as its three-year statute of limitations starts to run anew every time there is a fresh infringement.  But the appeals court dismissed the case based on the doctrine of laches, which bars suits brought after unreasonable delays.  By a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine did not apply to copyright claims for damages. Should Ms. Petrella be able to prove infringement, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority, she is entitled to recover damages for the three years before she sued.  It makes sense, she said, for potential plaintiffs to wait to see if there is enough money at stake to make a suit worthwhile. “Even if an infringement is harmful,” she wrote, “the harm may be too small to justify the cost of litigation.”  Waiting, on the other hand, Justice Ginsburg wrote, “allows a copyright owner to defer suit until she can estimate whether litigation is worth the candle.” Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that owns the film, said it had been harmed by Ms. Petrella’s delay in filing suit, noting that important witnesses had become unavailable. Mr. Petrella had died, and Mr. Lamotta has severe memory loss brought on in part, the trial judge said, by “myriad blows to his head.”  Justice Ginsburg responded that, in enacting a rolling three-year statute of limitations and allowing copyrights to be inherited, “Congress must have been aware that the passage of time and the author’s death could cause a loss or dilution of evidence.”  “Allowing Petrella’s suit to go forward will put at risk only a fraction of the income MGM has earned,” over the years, she concluded, “and will work no unjust hardship on innocent third parties, such as consumers who have purchased copies of ‘Raging Bull.’ ”  Justice Stephen G. Breyer dissented in the case, Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, No. 12-1315. He said the majority had been unduly rigid and had destroyed an important tool used by judges to correct inequities.  Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy joined the dissent.  Justice Breyer said Ms. Petrella had moved very slowly, waiting 18 years to sue after renewing the copyright in the screenplay in 1991. “During those 18 years,” he wrote, “MGM spent millions of dollars developing different editions of, and marketing, the film.” The studio also entered into licensing deals, some of them allowing television networks to broadcast the film through 2015.  Justice Breyer quoted from a seminal 1916 decision from Judge Learned Hand, then a federal district judge in Manhattan. It is not fair, Judge Hand wrote, for a plaintiff “to stand inactive while the proposed infringer spends large sums in its exploitation, and to intervene only when his speculation has proved a success.”  The doctrine of laches, Justice Breyer wrote, has a role to play in preventing that sort of gamesmanship. “In those few and unusual cases where a plaintiff unreasonably delays in bringing suit and consequently causes inequitable harm to the defendant,” he wrote, “the doctrine permits a court to bring about a fair result. I see no reason to erase the doctrine from copyright’s lexicon.”  A version of this article appears in print on May 20, 2014, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Reinstate Copyright Lawsuit Over ‘Raging Bull’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
The suit, filed in 2009 by the daughter of the author of the screenplay for the 1980 movie, had been dismissed on appeal for being brought too late.