Viacom lives to fight another day against YouTube.   The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a trial court ruling which summarily dismissed Viacom's copyright infringement claims against YouTube. Viacom and the other joint plaintiffs in the action sued YouTube in 2007 for copyright infringement of approximately 75,000 video clips.   After discovery, both sides moved for summary judgment.  The trial court ruled that YouTube was protected from any copyright infringement claims based [...]

An individual who goes by the name Princess Samantha Kennedy has filed an action in the United States District Court, Southern District of California claiming that Paramount Pictures used her novel and scripts to create the 1997 motion picture Titanic.  James Cameron received the writing credit for the movie. The complaint is hand written, fifteen pages long, and generally difficult to decipher. Inexplicably, however, Princess Samantha seems quite normal.  Here is a website cataloging some [...]

ReDigi bills itself as the first "online marketplace for pre-owned digital music."  Users upload their "used" digital music to the ReDigi marketplace for sale.  ReDigi then sells the "used" music for 79 cents, pays the user 10 cents, keeps 69 cents and (according to Capitol Records) pays the record companies nothing. According to the ReDigi website, ReDigi is the world's first and only online marketplace for pre-owned digital music. Its genius is in its ability [...]

In 2003 artist Derek Seltzer created a work titled "Scream Icon" show below: Seltzer printed posters and stickers of his art and placed them around Los Angeles on buildings, street signs and other public places.  In 2008, Roger Staub, who would later become a set designer for Green Day, took a photograph of a graffiti wall in Los Angeles that included one of Seltzer's posters.  The photograph taken by Staub is show below: In 2009, [...]

These days, software is not "sold" it is "licensed."  Although you bought and paid for the software, you do not own the software and never will.  One of the primary reasons software is licensed is to get around the "first sale doctrine."  The first sale doctrine allows someone who has purchased a copyrighted product to resell their copy of the product without restriction.  When software is licensed, you typically cannot resell it (which means the [...]

Astrolabe, Inc. an astrology (not astronomy) company based in Massachusetts is claiming copyright ownership to the world's historical time zone data. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts, Astrolabe has sued Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert, the founding contributor and current maintainer of the TZ Database which is used by computer programs and operating systems around the world to calculate historical time zone information. Astrolabe is apparently claiming it owns the factual [...]

Photographer Janine Gordon ("Gordon") filed a lawsuit against rival art photographer Ryan McGinley ("McGinley") claiming that McGinley infringed more than 150 of her photographs.  Gordon also sued three galleries that exhibited McGinley's works and Levi Strauss & Co., which used certain of the McGinley photographs in advertising campaigns. Gordon alleged in her complaint that McGinley's photographs are substantially similar to hers and, in fact, represent a pattern of infringement. Side-by-side examples were dissected in detail [...]

Perfect 10 is a website which sells subscriptions to view its collection of nude photographs. The photographs are in a password protected area of the Perfect 10 website and are not publicly available.  Certain third party websites copied Perfect 10's photographs and republished them on the internet without permission.  Once the photographs are on the public internet, Google indexes these third party websites and creates a thumbnail image of the photograph which it retains in [...]

Warner Bros., owner of the copyrights to the films Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, sued a group of defendants, including AVELA, for copyright infringement of those films.  AVELA obtained copies of movie posters and lobby cards from Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz which AVELA claimed were in the public domain.  AVELA then took those purported public domain images and created re-production posters and sold them.  In addition [...]

Several years before Google, Apple, and Amazon released their digital locker services for storing music, MP3tunes offered a similar service -- and was promptly sued by major record labels including Capitol Records.  As we await the court's decision now is a good time to recap the arguments made by both sides as well as the two Amicus briefs filed by Google and the Motion Picture Association of America.  Regardless of how the court decides an [...]