Justice Breyer, in the waning days of his tenure, wrote an opinion last week that will be of significant help to copyright owners. Historically a critic of copyright, it was Breyer who wrote the convoluted majority opinion in Google v. Oracle, which elided a core copyrightability question presented (the protection of APIs) by shoehorning the question into the second prong ...
The Supreme Court on Monday heard oral arguments in the copyright case Unicolors v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., a lawsuit bogged down in tiresome and tangential details, but which is important for independent creators. And speaking of tangential details, I noticed that Justice Sotomayor inadvertently used the term “patent trolls” during her brief interaction with counsel, and the reason ...
On June 1, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case of a highly clerical nature, but one of particular interest to photographers and other visual artists who typically register multiple works in Group registrations with the Copyright Office. To reduce filing fees and provide some organizational structure to certain applications, the Copyright Office offers various types of Group ...
Once the die was cast (i.e. after oral arguments) in Google v. Oracle, I don’t think I was alone in feeling that if the Supreme Court held that the computer code at issue in this case was not properly a subject of copyright protection, that would be an acceptably narrow decision, even though many might disagree with it as a ...
Professional creators following the case Allen v. Cooper were no doubt disappointed by the Supreme Court’s March 23 decision—a unanimous holding that the States (and/or their agents) are generally free to infringe copyrights with impunity. But perhaps authors of works should not to be entirely discouraged on this matter, because it seems clear from the opinions written that the Justices would have ...
