4809, enacted December 8, 1994) is an Act of Congress in the United States that implemented in U.S. law the Marrakesh Agreement of 1994.

But the United States denied this retroactivity of the Berne Convention and applied the rules of the treaty only to works first published after March 1, 1989.

[8] Earlier foreign works that were not covered by other treaties and that had until then not been subject to copyright in the U.S. remained uncopyrighted in the United States.

[9] The U.S. faced harsh criticism for its unilateral denouncement of the retroactivity of the Berne Convention defined in article 18,[8][10] and ultimately reversed its position.

The copyright changes implemented by the URAA in 17 USC 104A[11] remedied the situation and brought the U.S. legislation in-line with the requirements of the Berne Convention.

§ 104A administrative procedures for dealing with cases where someone was already and in good faith using a work that had been in the public domain but on which the copyright was restored by the URAA.

[17] In particular, rightsholders had to file a so-called "Notice of Intent to Enforce" (NIE) their restored copyright, or had to inform earlier users of their works (i.e., existing reliance parties) of that fact.

In Golan v. Gonzales, both the CTEA and the copyright restorations of the URAA were attacked as violating the Copyright and Patent clause (article I, §8, clause 8) of the U.S. constitution, which gives Congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

[21][22] On April 3, 2009, in the superseding case Golan v. Holder, Judge Lewis Babcock in the United States Court for the District of Colorado considered the URAA in violation of the First Amendment.

[27] A second case, Luck's Music Library, Inc. v. Gonzales, which only addressed the Copyright and Patent Clause issue, was dismissed.

[28] The Uruguay Round Agreements Act restored the United States copyrights of a number of well-known films in 1995.