Texts from  J.R.R. Tolkien and George Orwell have been removed from the public domain in the United States, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this week.

On Wednesday, The Supreme Court upheld a 1994 law which gives copyright protection to body of foreign works that had previously been available for free in the public domain.

Google hoped that the high court would overturn the law. The Wall Street Journal has more: “Google Inc. was the leading company challenging the law, in an echo of the separate battle in Washington over an Internet piracy bill that pits Google against movie studios. The search company, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, said in court papers that the restored copyrights could affect more than a million books it has scanned through its Google Books Library Project.”