Posts Tagged: "copyright infringement"

So what about the ZeniMax v. Facebook case? While you read many reports that make fantastical claims, it is important to remember that software copyright has been accepted and understood by the legal community as well as any law can be. Software copyrights have been formally codified since 1980, though copyrights on written works have been accepted since the founding of our nation. Nonliteral infringement is a long-standing and universally accepted result of copyright law and a legitimate reason for finding software copyright infringement. Was the verdict in this case correct? That is a different question entirely separate from whether software can be copyrighted and whether the legal theories were sound, but without facts to the contrary, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the jury made a correct decision.

On Wednesday, February 1st, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (N.D. Tex.) entered a case verdict which orders virtual reality developer Oculus VR to pay $500 million to Rockville, MD-based interactive computing firm ZeniMax Media Inc. The verdict is the latest activity in a case involving allegations of copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation levied against Oculus, now a subsidiary of social media giant Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) of Menlo Park, CA.

On Thursday, January 26th, Burbank, CA-based entertainment giant Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) and movie production firm DreamWorks of Universal City, CA, were named as defendants in a copyright infringement suit involving the 2016 romantic drama The Light Between Oceans. The suit, which also targets the screenplay author and NYC-based book publisher Simon & Schuster, Inc., charges that both the 2016 movie and the 2012 novel upon which it is based were both plagiarized from a 2004 screenplay written by the plaintiff, Joseph Nobile. The case has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.).

A copyright infringement battle of intergalactic proportions between Plaintiffs CBS and Paramount Pictures, and the company (along with its principal Alec Peters) looking to produce the crowdfunded Star Trek fan film Axanar (“Defendants”) is heating up. The parties have filed numerous motions in the past month, and the Court’s recent ruling on the parties’ motions for summary judgment means the case is inching closer and closer to its January 31 trial date… The Court then concluded that the “Axanar Works have objective substantial similarity to the Star Trek Copyrighted Works,” and therefore it “leaves the question of subjective substantial similarity to the jury.”

A patent and copyright squabble involving two players in the networking space for information technology (IT) development, which has ramped up in recent years, saw an interesting round of events play out in federal court and regulatory agencies this past December. At the center of the brouhaha is American networking and telecommunications giant Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) of San Jose, CA, which has filed multiple legal actions against Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) of Santa Clara, CA, alleging that Arista has moved into the networking equipment market using technologies developed and patented by Cisco, specifically through former Cisco employees who founded Arista.

Disney decided to add the State of Israel as a defendant since the Haifa port Customs unit that held the allegedly infringing goods is an Israeli government entity. Adding the state as a defendant, albeit a technical one, would allow, according to the Israeli territorial jurisdiction regulations, the Tel Aviv District Court to have jurisdiction… The Court rejected Disney’s claim and transferred the case to Haifa. In his decision, Judge Maor stated that ‘the dispute is between the Petitioners and the Plaintiff. The State is not a necessary and not a substantial party to the disagreements between them, but merely a “technical” one since it is holding the allegedly infringing goods…’.

Unfortunately for Hasbro, not all of its activities in the mobile gaming business have been completely original, leaving the game developer open to legal challenges. In late October, it was reported that Hasbro was named as a defendant in a copyright infringement action filed by Turkey-based gaming developer Peak Games in the San Francisco courthouse of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (N.D. Cal.). At the center of Peak Games’ complaint is Hasbro’s My Little Pony: Puzzle Party mobile game app, which Peak Games alleges is essentially a clone of that firm’s Toy Blast game.

The DMCA mandated that the Copyright Office establish a registry of designated agents for service of take-down notices. The initial system now appears to have been primitive. … Beginning December 1, 2016, service providers will be able to submit and update the names and contact information for their designated agents for receipt of take-down notices using a new electronic system. What is more, the fee charged for a paper filing, $105, will be reduced to just $6 for an electronic filing, reflecting the reduced claim on Copyright Office resources to input data and maintain a reliable resource.

Trump, no stranger to lawsuits himself, can now count U.S. district courts as the latest venue where his position could be on the decline. A suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (N.D. Ill.) lists Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Mike Pence and a series of 10 Does as defendants in a copyright infringement action. At the center of the lawsuit is a picture of a bowl of Skittles, which was used for a now-infamous metaphor for the Syrian refugee crisis. The copyright infringement action was brought by David Kittos, a British photographer, who claims that the Skittles tweet published by Donald Trump Jr. used a copyright protected image created by Kittos.

In early October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (2d Cir.) handed down a decision, which almost answered important questions about how cloud-based access to content can affect copyright holders. At issue in the case, Cheryl Smith v. Barnesandnoble.com, LLC, was Barnes & Noble’s activities in providing samples of a text through the cloud to consumers after a licensing agreement on that piece of text was terminated.

The plaintiffs allege that defendants YouTube-mp3 and its owner/operater, German citizen Philip Matesanz, facilitate the infringement of copyrighted sound recordings by offering a service that “rapidly and seamlessly” removes the audio tracks from YouTube videos, allowing users to store MP3 files on computing devices without the consent of YouTube or the plaintiffs and in violation of YouTube’s terms of service. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (C.D. Cal.), includes complaints for direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, inducement of copyright infringement and circumvention of technological measures. The suit lists 15 plaintiffs, including UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Atlantic Recording Corporation and Nonesuch Records.

On Monday, September 12th, Sid Bernstein LLC, a company representing Bernstein who passed away in 2013, filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement on the use of the Shea Stadium footage in the recent documentary. The suit charges that Sid Bernstein is the sole owner of the Shea Stadium master tapes by virtue of being a producer of the concert event and the employer for hire of the Beatles. The infringement suit targets both Apple Corps, the multimedia corporation set up by members of the Beatles in 1968 and involved with producing the new documentary, and Subafilms Ltd. The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.).

On Tuesday, August 9th, Ed Sheeran was named as a defendant in a copyright lawsuit filed by three heirs of American singer-songwriter Lee Townsend. Townsend, who passed away in 2003, was Marvin Gaye’s co-writer for his famous song “Let’s Get It On.” The suit, which also lists among the defendants Warner Music Group, Atlantic Records UK, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Amy Wadge, Sheeran’s co-writer on “Thinking Out Loud,” alleges that the song “copied the heart” of “Let’s Get It On” and repeated copyright infringing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic compositions throughout the song. The case, Griffin et al v. Sheeran et al, has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.).

This case concerns Star Athletica’s alleged infringement of Varsity Brands’ purported copyrights in the design of certain cheerleading uniforms. Under the Copyright Act, because clothing possesses an intrinsic utilitarian function (covering the body, providing warmth and protection from the elements, etc.), clothing designs historically have not been protected by copyright unless the claimed design is physically or conceptually separable from the garment’s utilitarian features. The district court found in favor of defendant Star Athletica, concluding that the design elements in Varsity Brands’ cheerleading uniforms were not separable from the uniform’s function. The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed, and in doing so, devised a new test for assessing the copyrightability of a design of a useful article.

Although the type of copyright infringement that gets the most attention today in our digital age is the downloading of music and/or movies, infringement of print and picture medium (such as photographs) is also punishable under the Copyright Act, and are a very real problem for publishers and photographers alike. Indeed, copyright infringement is an unfortunate reality for all content…