| Banks v. Manchester | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Submitted October 29, 1888 Decided November 19, 1888 | |
| Full case name | Banks v. Manchester |
| Citations | 128 U.S. 244 ( more ) 9 S. Ct. 36; 32 L. Ed. 425 |
| Holding | |
| States cannot confer copyrights on public domain case records to citizens or to states themselves. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinion | |
| Majority | Blatchford, joined by unanimous |
Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888), was a United States Supreme Court ruling that dealt with copyright.
In 1882, to facilitate the printing of records of the Supreme Court of Ohio, the State of Ohio passed a resolution to establish a copyright held by the Supreme Court of Ohio's court reporter and advertised a contract for the lowest bidder to print copies of the records for Ohio in exchange for obtaining exclusive publishing rights for two years. H. W. Derby & Company won the bidding war and assigned all their right and interest in the contract to Banks & Brothers. Banks then contracted the Capital Printing and Publishing Company to print the books.
Banks proceeded to print various reports such as Bierce et al. v. Bierce et al. and The Scioto Valley Railway Company v. McCoy. Although for a time exclusive to Banks's publications, G. L. Manchester published the cases in the American Law Journal, a periodical. Banks sought to stop Manchester from printing the cases. Manchester refused because judges had authored the decisions and so he claimed that Banks did not have a copyright. Banks's position was that the state's copyright, which was held by court reporter E. L. De Witt and licensed to Banks & Brothers, afforded exclusivity.
The Court ruled that the state could not hold a copyright and affirmed its decision in Wheaton v. Peters [1] by stating "what a court or a judge thereof cannot confer on a reporter as the basis of a copyright in him, they cannot confer on any other person or on the state." [2]
Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Act of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions.
Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc., 153 F.3d 82, was a copyright case about the Russian language weekly Russian Kurier in New York City that had copied and published various materials from Russian newspapers and news agency reports of Itar-TASS. The case was ultimately decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The decision was widely commented upon and the case is considered a landmark case because the court defined rules applicable in the U.S. on the extent to which the copyright laws of the country of origin or those of the U.S. apply in international disputes over copyright. The court held that to determine whether a claimant actually held the copyright on a work, the laws of the country of origin usually applied, but that to decide whether a copyright infringement had occurred and for possible remedies, the laws of the country where the infringement was claimed applied.
Henry Wheaton was an American lawyer, jurist and diplomat. He was the third reporter of decisions for the United States Supreme Court, the first U.S. minister to Denmark, and the second U.S. minister to Prussia.
A work of the United States government is defined by the United States copyright law, as "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties". Under section 105 of the Copyright Act of 1976, such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.
The reporter of decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States is the official charged with editing and publishing the opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States, both when announced and when they are published in permanent bound volumes of the United States Reports. The reporter is responsible for only the contents of the United States Reports issued by the Government Publishing Office, first in preliminary prints and later in the final bound volumes. The reporter is not responsible for the editorial content of unofficial reports of the court's decisions, such as the privately published Supreme Court Reporter and Lawyers' Edition.
Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. 591 (1834), was the first United States Supreme Court ruling on copyright. The case upheld the power of Congress to make a grant of copyright protection subject to conditions and rejected the doctrine of a common law copyright in published works. The Court also declared that there could be no copyright in the Court's own judicial decisions.
Donaldson v Becket (1774) 2 Brown's Parl. Cases 129, 1 Eng. Rep. 837; 4 Burr. 2408, 98 Eng. Rep. 257; 17 Cobbett's Parl. Hist. 953 is the ruling by the British House of Lords that held that copyright in published works was not perpetual but was subject to statutory limits. Some scholars disagree on the reasoning behind the decision.
Richard Peters, Jr. was an American attorney and the fourth reporter of decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving from 1828 to 1843.
Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1879), is a leading Supreme Court of the United States copyright case cited to explain the idea-expression dichotomy. The court held that a book did not give an author the right to exclude others from practicing what was described in the book, only right to exclude reproduction of the material in the book. Exclusive rights to a "useful art" described in a book was only available by patent.
The United States Reports are the official record of the Supreme Court of the United States. They include rulings, orders, case tables, in alphabetical order both by the name of the petitioner and by the name of the respondent, and other proceedings. United States Reports, once printed and bound, are the final version of court opinions and cannot be changed.
The Federal Reporter is a case law reporter in the United States that is published by West Publishing and a part of the National Reporter System. It begins with cases decided in 1880; pre-1880 cases were later retroactively compiled by West Publishing into a separate reporter, Federal Cases. The fourth and current Federal Reporter series publishes decisions of the United States courts of appeals and the United States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though the Federal Reporter is an unofficial reporter and West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the United States that legal professionals, including judges, uniformly cite to the Federal Reporter for included decisions. Approximately 30 new volumes are published each year.
The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1929, are in the public domain.
Cooper Manufacturing Co. v. Ferguson, 113 U.S. 727 (1885), was a suit regarding the legitimacy of a sale of a steam engine and other machinery in the State of Ohio.
Edict of government is a technical term associated with the United States Copyright Office's guidelines and practices that comprehensively includes laws, which advises that such submissions will neither be accepted nor processed for copyright registration. It is based on the principle of public policy that citizens must have unrestrained access to the laws that govern them. Similar provisions occur in most, but not all, systems of copyright law; the main exceptions are in those copyright laws which have developed from English law, under which the copyright in laws rests with the Crown or the government.
Veeck v. Southern Bldg. Code Congress Int'l, Inc., 293 F.3d 791, was a 2002 en banc 9-6 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, about the scope of copyright protection for building codes and by implication other privately drafted laws adopted by states and municipal governments. A three-fifths majority of the court's fifteen judges held that copyright protection no longer applied to model codes once they were enacted into law.
Callaghan v. Myers, 128 U.S. 617 (1888), was a United States Supreme Court ruling dealing with copyright.
Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), is a United States Supreme Court case regarding "whether the government edicts doctrine extends to—and thus renders uncopyrightable—works that lack the force of law, such as the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated" (OCGA). On April 27, 2020, the Court ruled 5–4 that the OCGA cannot be copyrighted because the OCGA's annotations were "authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties"; thus the Court found that the annotations fall under the government edicts doctrine and are ineligible for copyright.