BitLaw contains hypertext versions of the most important recent copyright cases. This document contains a brief summary of the recent cases, and links to those cases that have been added to BitLaw. Indexes are also available for Internet related cases.
You may wish to go directly to one of the topical subheadings for this index:
- Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (6th Cir. 1996)
- In Feist, the Supreme Court rejected the "sweat of the brow" doctrine that provided copyright protection for databases and compilation based upon the effort use to created the compilation. Instead, the court decided that compilations and databases are protected by copyright only when they are arranged and selected in an original manner. Although the level of originality needed is not very high, the white pages of a phone books are not protectable because the selection of the data (all customers in a geographic area) and the arrangement of the data (in alphabetical order) were not sufficiently original as to come under the protection of the Copyright Act. Consequently, the competing telephone directory publisher was allowed to extract all of the data from the white pages without liability for copyright infringement.
- Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, Inc. (6th Cir. 1996)
- In this case, a photocopying service was sued for copyright infringement for making "coursepacks" for students at the University of Michigan. Coursepacks are a grouping of readings assigned by a professor that are copied and bound together by a commercial copyshop. Although a system is available for the payment of copyright fees to publishers that allow the copying of materials in a coursepack, the copyshop in this case refused to pay such fees. In response to the claim of copyright infringement, the copyshop owner claimed that the creation of coursepacks for students was a fair use under the Copyright Act. The Sixth Circuit, in an en banc opinion, analysed the fair use factors and found that there was NO fair use.
- Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. National Enterprises, (U.S. 1985)
- The Supreme Court found that there was no fair use in the excerpts taken from President Ford's memoirs prior to their publication.
- The National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc. (2nd Cir. 1997)
- The Second Circuit confirmed that statistics from an NBA game are facts, and therefore are not subject to copyright law.
- The National Basketball Association v. Motorola, Inc. (2nd Cir. 1997)
- The Second Circuit held in this case that certain New York misappropriation laws were preempted by the Copyright Act. Specifically, the Court analyzed the "hot news" misappropriate common law rights in light of the 1976 amendments to the Copyright Act. Under the preemption provisions of that Act, only a narrow "hot news" misappropriate right remained. Therefore, the claims by the NBA against Motorola which involved transmitting live information about NBA games to pagers were dismissed.
- Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., (2nd Cir. 1992)
- The second Circuit adopted the "abstraction-filtration-comparison" three part test to analyze non-literal infringement claims in computer software. Utilizing this process, the Court found that in this instance, there was no copyrightable expression copied, so there is no copyright infringement.
- Engineering Dynamics, Inc. v. Structure Software, Inc. (5th Cir. 1994)
- The Fifth Circuit also adopted the "abstraction-filtration-comparison" test to analyze whether computer input and output forms are subject to copyright protection. The court rejects the summary argument that input or output forms should never be protected under copyright law.