Tag: Justin Hughes

Google v. Oracle VIII: On Juries Deciding Fair Use

Soon after the pandemic forced the Supreme Court to delay proceedings in Google v. Oracle, it directed the parties to “file supplemental letter briefs addressing the appropriate standard of review” with respect to the Federal Circuit’s decision in 2018, concluding that no reasonable jury could find that Google’s copying to create Android was fair use. On August 7, both parties filed their letters in response to the Court’s inquiry.

This is a nuanced matter, and I will leave the civil procedure questions to the practicing attorneys and those who have a detailed record on the day-to-day proceedings in this decade-long case. But I was intrigued by the broader copyright law consideration underlying the Court’s review standard question because it is one I have often thought about myself:  is fair use best weighed by a jury, by a court, or by some appropriate combination of the two? 

As a general rule, we look to juries to consider disputed issues of fact and courts to weigh or apply principles of law, and any copyright expert will tell you that a fair use analysis is a mix of fact and law. But as we see in Google v. Oracle, there can be ample disagreement about the line between fact and law that exists in a given fair use consideration.

As a simple example, consider factor three of the four-prong test—the amount and substantiality of the portion of the work used. A jury can reasonably arrive at a factual finding as to how much of a copyrighted work has been used. But the same jury may struggle somewhat with how much weight to give these facts with respect to the overall, four-factor, fair use analysis. Particularly because fair use is judge-made law, case law can be the most instructive guide, yet one which juries are not expected to know.

With that in mind, it is worth thinking about an argument presented by several legal scholars to the Supreme Court in defense of Google on this issue. They argued that the Federal Circuit’s failure to defer to the jury verdict on its ultimate conclusion of fair use was in error for three reasons. First, they argued it was unprecedented for a fair use finding by a jury to be overturned; second, they asserted that the court of appeals’ de novo standard for reviewing the matter was inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s standard; and third, they argued that the decision was an unconstitutional abridgement of the Seventh Amendment right to jury trial in civil litigation.

Is the “Exceptional Overruling” Truly Exceptional?

The first argument—that this was an unprecedented overturning of a fair use finding by a jury—may not carry much weight with the Court for the simple fact that jury decisions on fair use are not very common in the first place. Copyright cases involving fair use are typically decided on summary judgment, and fair use case law decisions encompasses a large anthology of discussion among judges that guides most fair use considerations before those questions get anywhere near a jury. [1] So, the supposed anomaly in Google v. Oracle, while it may be good for blog headlines, may not be as compelling a legal argument as it appears.

The Standard of Review: Are the Facts Really That “Complicated”?

The amici’s second argument—that the Federal Circuit erred when it engaged in de novo review—turns on that mix of law and fact bugaboo inherent to fair use analyses. When dealing with mixed questions of fact and law, the Supreme Court has stated that a court must decide whether the question tilts more toward fact or more toward law.  One reason for this is that when juries commit errors of factfinding, justice may not be served to the parties involved, but the law itself is not usually altered. Conversely, when errors of law are left intact without review, the law itself may be changed substantially, causing problems far beyond the specific case. Or as the Federal Circuit stated, in seeking to harmonize its standard with the Supreme Court’s opinion in U.S. Bank Nat’l Ass’n v. Vill. at Lakeridge, LLC (2018): 

Where applying the law to the historical facts “involves developing auxiliary legal principles of use in other cases—appellate courts should typically review a decision de novo. But where the mixed question requires immersion in case-specific factual issues that are so narrow as to “utterly resist generalization,” the mixed question review is to be deferential. [Citations omitted]

The Federal Circuit opinion devotes considerable time in its opinion explaining its approach before finding that de novo review was justified.  Nevertheless, amici for Google assert that the fair use analysis in this case is more factual than it is legal, tilting toward deference to the jury. Their basis for this is that, “the facts [in this case] are undeniably complicated.”

But are the facts in Google v. Oracle terribly complicated?  For instance, the Federal Circuit only highlighted eight facts it found to be relevant to the fair use analysis, including the finding on which the parties agreed that Google “copied material for the same purpose as in the original work” by using Java’s declaring code in Android. Even though that undisputed fact resolves the vast majority of the first prong of the fair use test, Google’s primary appeal to fair use is that its use of the Java packages to build Android —was “transformative” on the grounds that the work was used “in a new context.”

Here, the Federal Circuit correctly found this defense to be based on errors in both fact and law. Though I am admittedly jumping past the standard of review question, the record does not support Google’s claim of fair use. It deployed Oracle’s code for the same purpose in a small computer (a mobile device) instead of a large computer (a PC), which answers a question of fact; and even if this had been a new use, courts have largely held that “use in a new context” does not necessarily support a finding of “transformativeness,” which answers a question of law.

More generally, it is worth noting that “transformativeness” is one of the most vexing doctrines in the fair user’s handbook; it has confounded judges in district courts, sparked heated debate among legal scholars, and split circuits across the country. Very recently, in Brammer v. Violent Hues (2019), the Fourth Circuit held that a “…difference in purpose is not quite the same thing as transformation.” So, assessing “transformativeness” sounds an awful lot like a question of law amenable to review. As the Federal Circuit states in its opinion on this question:

… Google’s use of the API packages is not transformative as a matter of law because: (1) it does not fit within the uses listed in the preamble to § 107 ; (2) the purpose of the API packages in Android is the same as the purpose of the packages in the Java platform; (3) Google made no alteration to the expressive content or message of the copyrighted material; and (4) smartphones were not a new context.

Google characterizes the Federal Circuit’s holding as merely a challenge to “the sufficiency of the evidence,” based on its conclusion that “no reasonable jury could find that Google’s verbatim and entirely commercial use of the declaring code and SSO to compete against the Java platform was a fair use.’” (Citation omitted). Again, I will let the civil procedure question go, but note that to this layman, who probably knows fair use better than the average juror, that all reads as a mix of at least equal parts fact and law. “Verbatim,” “commercial,” and “potential” threat to the market are all bright yellow flags tilting against a finding of fair use as a matter of law. 

In fact, this is a pretty good example of what I referred to above as the distinction between juries and courts in fair use cases. Neither “verbatim” copying nor “commercial” use are disputed facts in this case. Yet a jury, even understanding these facts with little difficulty, can still err in apportioning weight to these factors in the overall fair use analysis. Hence review seems more than justified.

It is also notable that at least two of those subjects—“potential market” and “commercial use”– are frequently confused by the general public, and occasionally misapplied by district courts, as it was in Brammer. So, can a jury get these legal considerations wrong? I believe they can. Or as the letter for Oracle succinctly states, “A ‘primarily legal’ mixed question that is reviewed on appeal de novo does not somehow become a ‘factual’ one reviewed deferentially just because the factfinder was a jury rather than a judge.

What Does History and the Seventh Amendment Say?

Keep in mind that the procedural question at issue here is not whether the Federal Circuit erred in its holding that Google’s use of Oracle’s code was not a fair use (SCOTUS should rule on that question in the end), but only whether the appellate court applied the correct standard of review to the jury’s fair use finding , “including but not limited to any implications of the Seventh Amendment.”

To this, amici for Google present a final historical argument in order to draw two intertwined conclusions: 1) fair use in general is highly amenable to consideration by juries; and 2) evidence of fair use jury verdicts in eighteenth century English case law, establishes a jury right in the common law at the time of ratification of the Seventh Amendment.  

Citing two cases, Sayer v. Moore (1785) and Cary v. Kearsley (1802) amici for Google assert, “They represent common-law courts expressly recognizing that the jury should decide whether copyrighted material was used fairly by a defendant….History thus satisfies the constitutional test for whether to apply the Seventh Amendment to the issue of fair use.” These two cases are instructive, say the amici, because they entailed fair use questions presented to a jury. But according to a recent paper by Justin Hughes of Loyola Law School on this topic, those cases were not fair use cases—at least not cases consistent with the modern, American fair use doctrine. Hughes explains:[2]

As much as there are antecedents in these cases to our own thinking about copyright, there was also much going on that reflects concerns incongruent with today’s range of copyrighted works and ideas incompatible with our current themes.

In Sayer, for instance, Hughes observes that the jury charge contained prototypical elements of the idea/expression dichotomy more than facts relevant to a contemporary fair use consideration. And in Cary, Hughes agrees with New Zealand legal scholar Alexandra Sims who writes, “[Cary] represents the beginning of a judicial recognition of fairness in relation to the use of factual materials in the creation of new works, but not fairness in the sense of using material for the purpose of review and criticism or even quotation.” 

On that note, I will presume to interject here that it is a shaky proposal at best to imply that our modern concept of fair use was a living principle at the founding period, let alone one that was so well ingrained in England’s common law that one might hope to demonstrate that it was always viewed as a question of fact to go before a jury. I have not personally traced the fair use pedigree, but I have traced other copyright principles back a few centuries, and I would propose that the ways in which the Americans split with England are often more instructive to jurisprudence than the ways in which some historians identify precedent in the raw ingredients of a bygone world.

Perhaps most significantly, it is a unique feature of American copyright that fair use was, in part, codified so that copyright’s limitations would conform to our speech and press rights. And this is one area in which English and American copyright diverge significantly, especially when we travel back through the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, English copyright law did not wholly shed its ties to anachronistic licensing acts (i.e. state authority to publish) until the mid-twentieth century. So, it is quite a stretch to assert that when English judges in 1785 and 1802 gave their jury instructions in Sayer and Carey respectively, they were asking those juries to weigh anything that truly resembles American fair use doctrine in the twenty-first century.

“The only analog Google’s amici have cited is the ancient doctrine of ‘fair abridgment,’ states Oracle. “Fair abridgment categorically excused a historical practice of shortening a longer work enough to ‘be called a new [work].” And this is not even always true under our fair use doctrine. Fair use, as we know it, simply did not exist in 1791 at the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Still, the controlling part of the Seventh Amendment is the clause that says, “…and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”

This prohibition on reexamination is precisely why Google and its amici hope to emphasize the factual nature of fair use considerations and endeavor to straighten the historical line between England’s Lord Mansfield in Sayer, and America’s Justice Story, who became the judicial father of fair use when he presided over the case Folsom v. Marsh (1841). Citing Story in a subsequent case, Emerson v. Davies, amici for Google emphasize that Justice Story “described fair use as a ‘question of fact to come to a jury’ in 1845.”

But Professor Hughes asserts, quite reasonably, that Justice Story said nothing of the kind—at least not as a bright line rule that implicates a standard of review. Instead, Hughes elucidates:

Story is just quoting Mansfield in Sayer—and what Mansfield said in Sayer wasn’t specifically about fair use to begin with. Nowhere in Emerson v. Davies does Story say he himself believes that the test he set out in Folsom was a ‘question of fact to come to a jury.’

In fact, with respect to the standard of review, even if there were not a meaningful ideological divergence between England and the U.S., Hughes declares unequivocally:

Legal historians have yet to find any ruling or statement that a copyright infringement defendant in a court of equity had the right to remove the case to a court of law or to have any elements of the infringement action decided by a jury sitting in one of those courts of law.

Are Copyright Critics Begging for Uncertainty in Fair Use?

Finally, it should not go unnoticed that many of the same advocates for deference to the jury in Google v. Oracle share ideological kinship with some of copyright’s most ardent critics, who often write in papers, blogs, and social media comments that copyright is unjust because of its uncertainties. More specifically, asking for legal certainty in the software market is an explicitly stated goal by several of the amici who have filed on behalf of Google in this case. But it is hard to see this deference to the jury argument as anything other than a departure from that view, or as anything other than an argument of convenience in the moment. After all, if fair use considerations, already a complicated matter, are best left to juries without judicial review, it can only add uncertainty with implications for copyright law that go well beyond the short-term exigencies of software companies.  Or as Hughes puts it:

… if one wants a fair use eco-system in which there are some areas of more objective ex ante rule-like norms exempting certain reasonably defined categories of behavior from copyright liability – if one believes (as Justice Kennedy clearly did) that much of the conduct exempted by § 107 fair use is “amenable to regulation by rule” — one is likely to prefer de novo review as a means to clarify what is and is fair use.

On a very broad level, Google’s letter argues that a jury “properly decides fair use because it is well suited, from both a practical and a policy perspective, to determine how a ‘reasonable’ party would assess the defendant’s conduct.” And right there is where I return to my personal musings on this question and find that this “reasonableness” standard (i.e. a jury’s gut feel) is inherently disconcerting. I have consistently seen users of works and owners of works reveal a general misunderstanding of fair use. So, I believe Oracle’s letter is more on the money when it states that “fair use does not ask what feels fair to an ordinary person.” Instead, it “applies judge-made factors codified in the Copyright Act and elucidated by additional legal rules developed in a vast body of fair use precedent.”

[1] An analysis of district court opinions between 1978-2005 found that “more than half of the opinions addressed a motion or cross-motion for summary judgment, and of these 121 opinions, 86% granted the motion or one of the cross-motions. This supports the conventional wisdom that courts regularly resolve fair use issues at the summary judgment stage.”  Barton Beebe, An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 156, No. 3.

[2] Justin Hughes. “The Respective Role of Judges and Juries in Fair Use Determinations.” Loyola Law School. Legal Studies Paper No. 2020-09

On the Serbian Proposal to Abolish Photography Copyright 

Last week, the Serbian Parliament unanimously voted down a proposal to abolish copyright protection in that country for what it called “routinely made” digital photography. In fact, according to the Facebook page Protect Photographers Copyright, even the individual member of Serbia’s ruling Progressive Party, Dusica Stojakovic, who introduced the measure, did not vote for it herself.  This was the second time the proposal to abolish these rights has come up for a vote and was defeated; but professional photographers, especially photojournalists, say the idea is not dead and the fight is not over.

The strangeness of this proposal, particularly coming from the party leading Serbia’s fledgling democracy, is a bit hard to fathom.  After all, the potential of disenfranchising professional photojournalists while leading democratic reform is entirely inconsistent with the stated agenda of the party—not to mention the history of democratic reform.  And in fact, this story by Bogdan Ivanisevic, writing for Balkan Insight, states:

“Abolition of copyright in photographs tout court is not what the ruling Serbian Progressive Party and its partners ever intended.

What they aimed for was to abolish copyright for a subgroup of photographs, those “routinely created” as the proposed text phrased it.

That said, had the ruling majority adopted the text as formulated by parliament’s legal committee, it would have been troubling.”

So, without being Belgrade insiders, we might interpret these events as an attempt to fashion a legal distinction between the professional class of photos and the millions of selfies and snapshots uploaded to the Internet.  And presumably, the professional photographers who have protested this measure agree with Ivanisevic in identifying as “troubling” the overly broad language in the party’s measure, which is stated thus:

“Every routinely made photograph, which appears and is taken in electronic form, regardless of whether it is the true original creation of an author, will cease to enjoy protection as the creation of an author.”

Copyright laws in Europe vary with regard to granting protection to “non-original” photographs, which is to say the courts have differing means of interpreting “originality” in a legal sense. But it is beyond problematic to attempt to make these distinctions at the legislative level. The “amateur” is more than capable of taking a highly original photograph; she may turn professional or take a handful of pictures of great artistic value without necessarily considering herself a “photographer”.  Are the early snapshots of a great artist of no value because they’re not his “serious” works?  What about iconic and invaluable serendipity like the 8mm film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination captured by a tourist named Abraham Zapruder?

Copyright skeptics will answer many of these questions with abolishment or abridgment of copyright protection for all images.  This seems particularly true today in reaction to the ubiquity of images captured and uploaded every second to various web platforms; and this thinking appears to be a factor in Serbia’s Progressive Party as well. But if we look at the history of photography in the US, as well as about 150 years worth of legal theory on the copyrightability of the photograph, the increase in volume of what we might call “casually made” images does not really change the calculus all that much.  In fact, while the US has a very low standard of “originality” in copyright, both the theory behind that rationale and the practical applications of enforcement generally conform to common and reasonable distinctions between “original” and “non-original” photographs.

While it may seem to a casual observer that the question of copyright in the photograph is different today than in pre-Internet times, the truth is that both the theoretical and practical questions currently summon the same discussions as when the medium was first invented. It is common to say that photography—along with just about everything else—has been “democratized” by digital technology; and from this generalization comes the notion that it seems absurd to contemplate a copyright in every one of the billions of images that travel from smart phones to Web servers around the world every hour.  And as a matter of practical application, it is absurd to imagine a copyright in every one of these images, but it is also fortunately not necessary.

For starters, the process of making photos was democratized at least ninety years before the availability of the first personal computer. In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co. introduced the Kodak camera, which they advertised as “The only camera anybody can use without instructions.” And by the early 1970s, if you were me as a child stuck watching your grandfather’s vacation slides, you knew for certain that the Eastman/Kodak company had more than surpassed its goal of democratizing the photographic process. In fact, we can safely assume that, even by the 1950s, there must have been billions of images processed by millions of non-professional photographers all over the world. So, while it may be true that innovations like the smart phone have surely increased the number of images captured by every man, woman, child, and monkey, there was already a staggering volume of “amateur” photos in the world long before the inventors of Instagram were even born.

Moreover, the expansiveness of digital imaging can be somewhat exaggerated as a  justification for devaluing the photograph on principle, particularly when there is a corresponding disposability or invisibility that comes with digital diffusion of casually-made images.  The same technology that makes capture and upload so easy also makes the majority of these experiences fleeting for both makers and viewers. Still, what is unquestionably different today is the ability, in principle, for everyone’s proverbial grandfather to show his vacation photos to the entire world; but this fact alone does not inherently change the conversation about copyrights in photography from either a theoretical or a practical perspective.

The Copyrightability of the Photograph

Almost from the invention of the process, debate began among critics, connoisseurs, and artists as to whether the photograph was in any way a creatively expressive medium or merely a mechanical means for recording data.  And this dichotomy still manifests in the words of photo teachers everywhere, when they ask new students,  What makes a great photograph? It is not by coincidence that this same aesthetic discussion parallels the legal questions of copyrightability; and this is one reason why photography was so influential in the history of copyright law. For the first time, anybody with comparatively little training could make an image, and so grappling with the technology itself helped reshape copyright law for the modern age.  But it is also not farfetched to think that the copyright considerations themselves helped to shape the evolution of photography as well.

Loyola Law School professor Justin Hughes explores these ideas in detail in his paper The Photographer’s Copyright, published in 2012 in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology.  He explains that from the time photographs were protected under copyright (1865 in the US), judges had to wrestle with more or less the same ideas, theories, and biases as art critics in order to consider what, if anything, makes one of these machine-made images an original work of authorship.

Today, with decades of tradition behind us, we generally recognize that a photograph can be either an expressive work or a mechanical record or both; but in early efforts to identify the hand of the author (i.e. what qualities make a photograph copyrightable), jurisprudence leaned first in the direction of giving weight to the photographer’s process and later in the direction of evaluating the end product, regardless of how the image was made.  The chronology of this thought process is due to the fact that the first case to come to the Supreme Court in 1884—which involved the infringement of a studio portrait of Oscar Wilde made by Napoleon Sarony—forced the Court to seriously consider the defendant’s argument that photographs should not be copyrightable at all. Thus, their analysis of the image known as Oscar Wilde No.18 focused on the specific choices made by Sarony in the studio in order to capture a brief moment of reality.

This identifying “originality” (in the legal sense) by examining the process of the photographer can be objectively expedient when the choices made by the author are readily apparent, as would be the case with a contemporary fashion photograph made with models, props, lighting effects, etc.  But this line of analysis becomes more problematic when considering a photograph of a documentary nature, like a landscape, street photograph, or the work of photojournalism—all examples in which the photographer cannot possibly control many of the elements that constitute the resulting image.  Furthermore, as Hughes discusses, these documentary images must also be compared and contrasted with photographs that are purely mechanical and/or made for the sole purpose of recording data—like surveillance imagery, mapping, or evidence.

For instance, what is the difference between the evidence-gathering photography of a police officer investigating a homicide in 1941 and one of the now-famous photographs taken by Wegee (Arthur Fellig) at the same crime scene? No doubt, many people can answer that question from an artistic perspective, but in reviewing the legal theory from the 1860s to the present, Hughes describes judicial views that sound not unlike those of the art or cultural critic. In other words, the features that make Wegee’s photo more expressive and more engaging than the photos taken by the detective also happen to make it more copyrightable. Hughes notes this subjectivity when he writes, “Where we think it is fair to offer legal protection, we will be more likely to find copyright sustaining originality.”

Hughes reports that in 1903, Justice Holmes introduced the notion of personality to the discussion in the case Bleistein v Donaldson Lithographing Co. This is the moment when copyright law becomes as universally available as photography itself.  Hughes writes, “Bleistein provided American law with an originality threshold low enough that all can enter, giving us a deeply egalitarian, democratic copyright law that has neither place nor need for the creative genius.”   From this notion comes the idea of “seepage”, which is used by copyright scholars to describe the notion that even when multiple individuals engage in the same creative action (e.g. tourists taking pictures of a national monument), that each individual cannot help but imbue her own images with her personality—that the individual’s character seeps into the work.

This low threshold of originality might appear to invite the aforementioned absurdity of billions of copyrights in billions of mediocre images, but not quite. Because concurrent with this egalitarian approach to originality for broad protection under copyright comes an equally thin patina of analysis as to precisely what may be copyrightable within a specific image, and in what contexts.  From the analyses applied in specific cases, we learn that there can be considerable similarity between two images, both of which can have a copyright, and neither of which necessarily infringes upon the other. These analyses can factor greatly in a specific case—particularly if it’s creator v creator—but for the broader question of copyrightability, it was first sufficient that the author asserted originality, and then after 1976, that photographs would be entitled to the same automatic copyright as all other works

This brings us to a practical reason why the Serbian proposal is so unnecessary—at least insofar as its Parliament might look to US copyright law for guidance–and this is the matter of registration.  Because while it is true that every US citizen who snaps a photo does have an automatic copyright in that image, this is functionally irrelevant in most cases unless the individual registers the image with the Copyright Office.  This is due to the financial realities of litigating an infringement claim in federal court.  If an image is registered, the rights holder may seek statutory damages for infringement, which is essential because proving actual damages from a use is a much more challenging legal argument to present.

So, unless the image owner has the resources to spend in an effort to prove actual damages in an infringement case—this by the way implies that photography is probably his/her profession—the inability to claim statutory damages (due to non-registration) is a barrier to engaging a litigator to pursue a case at all.  Hence, while there may be billions of non-professional images out there, even very good ones, there are likewise billions of reasons these will not be registered in jurisdictions in which an infringement claim is feasible.  Moreover, simply by choosing to upload personal pictures to certain platforms, the photographer cedes considerable—if not all—grounds for an ownership claim in the image as stated in some Terms of Service.  If anything, the new realities of the digital age ought to give “amateur” image makers a moment’s pause to consider the implications and rights associated with the photos they share rather than going the other direction of abandoning IP rights as obsolete.

Rather than rephrase the Serbian proposal—particularly if it is a reaction to digital ubiquity—the Progressive Party should abandon the idea that it is necessary, possible, or democratic to attempt to define at the legislative level “originality” in photographic works. The US has automatic copyrights, a low threshold of originality, trillions of “amateur” photographs, a vibrant professional, art, and journalism class of photographers; and our courts are not overrun with infringement cases in these works. For the sake of free expression, for journalism, and for economic development, the Serbian Parliament should affirm a copyright in all photographs and let their courts settle actual disputes.