De minimis analysis involves the substantiality of the copying, not the use to which the infringing work is put; by definition, wholesale copying of a protected work cannot be de minimis copying. A company that owned a website on which it unknowingly displayed a photographer’s photo without authorization could not assert a de minimis defense…
The reproduction of an author’s articles in a newspaper’s online archive was not protected from copyright infringement claims by Section 108(a) of the Copyright Act because this archive was not a “library” or “archive” within the meaning of this section. The author of two articles whose copyright infringement claims against a newspaper over the electronic…
Whether the parties to an agreement had intended to transfer the copyrights as part of its overall transfer of intellectual property was a question of material fact that should not have been decided by the court on summary judgment. An agreement between two affiliated companies did not unambiguously prohibit the transfer of copyrights as part…
The statutory schemes of Italian and U.S. copyright law differ in their allocation of authorship status in that Italian law does not recognize the ab initio statutory allocation of copyright to the commissioner of a work made for hire. The assignment to a music publisher of composer Ennio Morricone’s copyrights in six Italian movie scores…
Although the litigant was unsuccessful in her prior litigation, allowing her to proceed now by asserting facts completely opposite to those she asserted earlier would create the perception that the earlier court was misled. A litigant who previously had claimed that she was the co-author of a 1978 Julio Iglesias song was estopped from now…
