The district court’s rejection of the employee’s qualified immunity arguments on summary judgment was nonappealable. The U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans lacked jurisdiction to hear an appeal of a district court’s summary judgment ruling finding that material facts precluded deciding as a matter of law the validity of a qualified immunity defense asserted…
In its landmark 1994 decision Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruled that Campbell’s creation of a rap parody version of a popular Roy Orbison song could be fair use because it transformed the original song by adding something new, with a different purpose, or a new meaning…
Because the artists who would form part of the class had entered into licensing agreements with varying terms, individual issues would prevail over common questions. A district court improperly certified a class of songwriters and artists whose allegedly unlicensed performances can be downloaded and listened to from a popular music memorabilia website, the U.S. Court…
Google prevails in what it has called “the copyright case of the decade.” Google LLC’s copying of approximately 11,000 lines of code from the Java SE application programming interface to create the Android mobile operating system was a fair use of that material as a matter of law and did not support copyright infringement by…
A reasonable jury could find the design for children’s pajamas with the phrase “i love you” repeated in italics to be substantially similar to Target’s products with the same phrase and design. In a copyright infringement suit brought by a children’s clothing company against retailer Target Corporation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth…
Although the author worked under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement when he penned the movie, the right to ownership was governed by copyright law and not labor law. The writer of the screenplay for Friday the 13th, the classic summer camp thriller that spawned a generation of equally campy horror films, was entitled to…
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…
Heirs of “Game of Life” developer failed to overcome work-for-hire doctrine in bid to terminate developer’s original transfer of rights to Hasbro predecessor. The federal district court in Providence, Rhode Island, correctly determined that heirs of toy developer Bill Markham could not reacquire copyrights to the boardgame “The Game of Life” from Hasbro, Inc., and…
Although the contract between a makeup artist and her publisher described the artist as the author of the book, the dispute still arose under the Copyright Act because “author” is a term defined under the Act. The dispute between a makeup artist and her publisher over ownership of the copyright to a makeup guide raised…
A builder of sunrooms allegedly adapted the brochure for online use without permission, but the designer’s application with the Copyright Office was still pending when she filed suit. A graphic designer’s copyright infringement claim against a builder of sunroom additions—which allegedly modified and used online a print brochure that she had designed for the builder—was…
