Posts Tagged: "copyright infringement"

In Allen v. Cooper, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (CRCA) (codified at 17 U.S.C. §§ 501(a) & 511) did not abrogate a state’s sovereign immunity from copyright infringement liability. A casual reading of that decision might have led one to reasonably believe that it ended the plaintiffs’ copyright case. After all, the Supreme Court indicated that it affirmed a holding that the CRCA was “invalid.” But, as with so many other issues encountered in the legal realm, much lies below the surface. The aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision cast light on the realization that the Court addressed only “prophylactic” abrogation, which seeks to deter constitutional harm before it occurs. On remand, the plaintiffs convinced the district court to consider whether the state’s sovereign immunity could be negated via a “case by case” type of abrogation, which requires actual violation of both a federal statute and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Recently, Netflix released a documentary titled, “The Most Hated Man on the Internet,” which is about anti-revenge porn activists and their efforts to take down the website, IsAnyoneUp.com. The site was founded by Hunter Moore and allowed anyone to anonymously upload nude photos with social media handles or to submit sexually explicit photos of others without their consent. The documentary follows Charlotte Laws, whose daughter’s photos were shared on the site, as she launches a campaign to shut it down.

Anna Pasternak is the Claimant in a recent copyright case at the UK High Court of Justice and author of Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago (“Lara”). Lara is a non-fiction, historical book that was published in the United Kingdom in August 2016. It is a love story of Pasternak’s great uncle, Boris Pasternak, poet and author of the book Doctor Zhivago, and his mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, who is portrayed as Lara Antipova in Doctor Zhivago. The Claimant is also the owner of the copyright in a translation of extracts from a book called Légendes de la Rue Potapov” (“the Légendes Translation”). Lara Prescott is the Defendant in the case at issue and author of The Secrets We Kept (“TSWK”), a historical, fictional account of a late 1950s CIA operation, which used copies of Doctor Zhivago as propaganda against the Soviet Union. Prescott, who is named after Lara Antipova, has always been fascinated by the novel. TSWK was published both in the United States and the United Kingdom in September 2019.

This August, the Door Christian Fellowship McAllen Church made some unfortunate headlines after it came to light that the church had produced and staged a performance that made unauthorized use of original works from the blockbuster Broadway musical, Hamilton. By the end of the month, The Door had issued an apology for the unauthorized performances and agreed to pay damages and destroy any recordings of the staged performance in respect of the intellectual property protections of Hamilton’s creators. While this unlicensed and infringing use was quickly dealt with by Hamilton’s legal team, there have been other instances of recalcitrant producers who have only been held accountable for staging unlicensed theatrical works after years of infringement.

Johnny Depp and guitarist Jeff Beck filed a lawsuit last Friday against folklorist and SUNY Buffalo professor Bruce Jackson, who accused the pair of plagiarizing a song on their latest album, “18”. In two demand letters the folklorist sent in August, Jackson alleged that Depp and Beck infringed the copyright of the poem “Hobo Ben” by copying entire passages. However, in their lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, Depp and Beck’s lawyers argue that Jackson never owned the copyright to “Hobo Ben,” as it was “part of an oral tradition passed down for generations and performed by an unidentified individual.” Therefore, they are asking the judge for a declaration of noninfringement, so the pair can “preserve their rights, defend their good names, and protect their business and business relationships.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Wednesday affirmed a district court’s comprehensive order finding that Day to Day Imports, Inc. (DDI) acted with willful blindness in submitting a fifth Takedown Notice to Amazon asking that auto stickers it alleged infringed its licensed artwork be removed from the site. DDI took a license in 2016 to the copyright for artwork created by Harold Walters for a set of replacement stickers for the dashboard climate controls for certain General Motors vehicles. In 2018, Alper Automotive, Inc. began selling a sticker that DDI alleged infringed the licensed copyright. DDI sent Takedown Notices to Alper on May 8, 2018; May 15, 2018; August 2, 2018; and November 1, 2018.

On June 6, Paramount Pictures got its tower buzzed for copyright infringement in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California over the blockbuster film of the summer, Top Gun Maverick. According to the allegations in the complaint, in 1983, author Ahud Yonay wrote a magazine story about the real-life exploits of two naval fighter pilots entitled, “Top Guns.” Paramount allegedly secured the “exclusive motion picture rights to Ehud Yonay’s copyrighted story” and in 1986 released the motion picture Top Gun. Fast forward a few decades. In 2018, Yonay’s heirs (Plaintiffs in this action who are both Israeli citizens) allegedly served Paramount with a notice “terminating” the original assignment of the motion picture rights to Paramount. Paramount apparently took the position that the purported termination was ineffective and, over the Memorial Day weekend, launched Top Gun Maverick to critical acclaim at the box office (and to the delight of millions of fans of the original 1980s classic).

In the winter of 2014, Leah Bassett rented her Martha’s Vineyard home to Joshua Spafford. He seemed like a nice guy, quiet and well-dressed. Joshua listed his employer as “Mile High Media.” Mile High then used the home to shoot several adult videos. Leah, the homeowner, didn’t know that they were going to use her home in this way. She was upset when she learned what they had done, but in the end, she got her revenge thanks to copyright law.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has rejected a legal challenge to Article 17 of Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. (Case C-401/19 Republic of Poland v. European Parliament and Council, ECLI:EU:C:2022:297.) The challenge was brought by the government of Poland. It argued that Article 17 of the Directive, which concerns the liability of online service providers for copyright-infringing content uploaded by users, infringed the rights to freedom of expression and information. The rights to freedom of expression and information are guaranteed in Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU.

Preventing others from copying your robot’s AI-driven face, expressions and vocalizations requires a comprehensive intellectual property strategy. That’s one of the takeaways from a pending dispute between robot makers as described in Digital Dream Labs, LLC v. Living Technology (Shenzhen) Co. (pending in the Western District of Pennsylvania). The case involves plaintiff DDL, which owns registered copyrights in desktop humanoid-vehicle hybrid robots called COZMO and VECTOR (see below left and middle), and defendant Living.AI, whose headphone-wearing, skateboard riding, humanoid robot called EMO (below right) is alleged by DDL to infringe its copyrights. Both companies reportedly deployed AI software on their robots that selects graphical animations and sounds to output based on the robot’s reactions with its environment and user.

On April 6, the UK High Court issued a judgment of non-infringement in favor of artist Ed Sheeran over his 2017 song, “Shape of You.” The court held that Sheeran did not copy a part of Defendant Sami Chokri’s 2015 song called “Oh Why.” The ruling came nearly four years after co-writers Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue (collectively, Defendants) first accused Sheeran and his co-writers, Snow Patrol’s John McDaid and producer Steven McCutcheon (collectively, Plaintiffs) of deliberately and consciously copying from a part of “Oh Why.” Alternatively, the Defendants contended that he did so subconsciously.

You may have heard that on January 1, 2022, Winnie-the-Pooh and the other characters from the Hundred Acre Wood are now in the public domain. But did you know that not all of Christopher Robin’s friends are treated the same in the eyes of copyright law? The characters have multiple authors, including A.A. Milne who first published Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, and The Walt Disney Company, which brought the stories to the screen. Milne’s characters from his 1926 books entered the public domain at the beginning of this year, but Disney’s iteration remains copyright protected for now.

On November 15, Houston-area aerial photographer Jim Olive Photography filed a petition for writ of certiorari asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up an appeal from the Texas Supreme Court, which had denied Olive’s copyright claims against the University of Houston System on sovereign immunity grounds. In the petition, Olive requests that the Supreme Court simply grant certiorari, vacate the lower decision and remand for reconsideration of the issues in light of the Court’s decision this summer in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, which was issued just a few days after the Texas Supreme Court ruled against Olive.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit yesterday reversed a Missouri district court’s grant of summary judgment for a group of real estate companies relating to copyright infringement claims brought by an architect over floorplans. While the appeals court said that another defense might well be available to the companies, the text of the statute, the broader statutory context, and the legislative history all suggest that “floorplans” were not intended to be encompassed by Section 120(a) of the U.S. Copyright Act.

The actor Meghan Markle gained fame playing a paralegal in the TV show Suits. Now, as Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Sussex, she is starring in her own legal drama in London’s High Court. On February 11, Mr. Justice Warby granted summary judgment in favor of the Duchess on most of the issues in her privacy and copyright case brought against Associated Publishers, which publishes the tabloid Mail on Sunday newspaper and MailOnline website in the U.K. The Duchess brought the action over the publication in February 2019 of five articles that included 88 quotations from a letter she had sent to her father, in which she discussed their relationship. She claimed that the publication of the articles involved (1) a misuse of her private information, (2) a breach of the defendants’ duties under data protection law and (3) an infringement of her copyright in the letter.