In a decision called “curious” by an intellectual property expert, a federal appellate panel in Atlanta has reversed its circuit’s 6-year-old opinion in a major copyright case, declaring the ruling’s mandate on behalf of freelance photographers to be “moot.”

In doing so, the three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded freelance writers’ copyrights in a way that limited the copyright claims of freelance photographers.