 |
| Callaghan v. Myers | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued November 8–9, 1888 Decided December 17, 1888 | |
| Full case name | Callaghan v. Myers |
| Citations | 128 U.S. 617 ( more ) 9 S. Ct. 177; 32 L. Ed. 547 |
| Holding | |
| Arrangements of public domain records can represent copyrightable intellectual effort. | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinion | |
| Majority | Blatchford, joined by unanimous |
Callaghan v. Myers, 128 U.S. 617 (1888), was a United States Supreme Court ruling dealing with copyright.
The firm of Eugene B. Myers & Chandler, composed of Myers and Horace P. Chandler, purchased the copyright of the arrangement of a number of Illinois Supreme Court records compiled by Norman L. Freeman. It printed those works as the Illinois Reports Volumes 32 to 38 from 1865 to 1867. Myers alone held the copyright to Freeman's arrangements of Volumes 39 to 46 and printed them as well.
The conflict began when Myers made some changes to the arrangement of Volumes 37 and 38 and published them by observing the procedure to procure copyright on these alternative works. The defendants, Callaghan & Company, offered to purchase licenses to publish the new versions of Volumes 37 and 38 but would not pay Myers's price. Instead, they made very minor changes to Myers's version, copied essentially verbatim the portions of the book that were actually copyrightable, and published it as their own work. Myers sued them for copyright infringement, and the case eventually went to the Supreme Court.
The Court upheld earlier case law, such as Banks v. Manchester , which state that court documents belonged to the public domain. In regards to the case at hand, it ruled that the elements of the books that organized or summarized those judicial works constitute intellectual effort. Therefore, Myers held the copyright because he followed the copyrighting procedures in all cases except one. The Court found that the copies of Volume 32 that were required for formally copyrighting the work had arrived late and so that volume was not copyrighted. Nonetheless, the plaintiff, Myers, was entitled to compensation in full for the infringement damages if he chose to collect them. [1]
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.
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Does the sole right to vend secure to the owner of the copyright the right, after a sale of the book to a purchaser, to restrict future sales of the book at retail, to the right to sell it at a certain price per copy, because of a notice in the book that a sale at a different price will be treated as an infringement, which notice has been brought home to one undertaking to sell for less than the named sum?
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Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court decision in which public interest in learning about a historical figure's impressions of a historic event was held not to be sufficient to show fair use of material otherwise protected by copyright. Defendant, The Nation, had summarized and quoted substantially from A Time to Heal, President Gerald Ford's forthcoming memoir of his decision to pardon former president Richard Nixon. When Harper & Row, who held the rights to A Time to Heal, brought suit, The Nation asserted that its use of the book was protected under the doctrine of fair use, because of the great public interest in a historical figure's account of a historic incident. The Court rejected this argument holding that the right of first publication was important enough to find in favor of Harper.
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New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001), is a leading decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of copyright in the contents of a newspaper database. It held that The New York Times, in licensing back issues of the newspaper for inclusion in electronic databases such as LexisNexis, could not license the works of freelance journalists contained in the newspapers.
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Illinois Tool Works Inc. v. Independent Ink, Inc., 547 U.S. 28 (2006), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving the application of U.S. antitrust law to "tying" arrangements of patented products. The Court ruled unanimously that there is not a presumption of market power under the Sherman Antitrust Act when the sale of a patented product is conditioned on the sale of a second product in a tying arrangement. A plaintiff alleging an antitrust violation must instead establish the defendant's market power in the patented product through evidence.
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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.
Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888), was a United States Supreme Court ruling that dealt with copyright.
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