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.
In the copyright law of the United States, a work made for hire is a work subject to copyright that is created by an employee as part of his or her job, or some limited types of works for which all parties agree in writing to the WFH designation. Work for hire is a statutorily defined term, so a work for hire is not created merely because parties to an agreement state that the work is a work for hire. It is an exception to the general rule that the person who actually creates a work is the legally recognized author of that work. According to copyright law in the United States and certain other copyright jurisdictions, if a work is "made for hire", the employer—not the employee—is considered the legal author. In some countries, this is known as corporate authorship. The entity serving as an employer may be a corporation or other legal entity, an organization, or an individual.
Entertainment law, also referred to as media law is legal services provided to the entertainment industry. These services in entertainment law overlap with intellectual property law. Intellectual property has many moving parts that include trademarks, copyright, and the "Right of Publicity". However, the practice of entertainment law often involves questions of employment law, contract law, torts, labor law, bankruptcy law, immigration, securities law, security interests, agency, right of privacy, defamation, advertising, criminal law, tax law, International law, and insurance law.
The SCO–Linux disputes are a series of legal and public disputes between the software company SCO Group (SCO) and various Linux vendors and users. The SCO Group alleges that its license agreements with IBM means that source code that IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagree with SCO's claims; IBM, Novell and Red Hat have ongoing claims against SCO.
SCO v. Novell was a United States lawsuit in which The SCO Group (SCO) claimed ownership of the source code for the Unix operating system, including portions of Linux. SCO sought to have the court declare that SCO owned the rights to the Unix code, including the copyrights, and that Novell had committed slander of title by claiming those rights for itself.
John Hartley Manners was a London-born playwright of Irish extraction who wrote Peg o' My Heart, which starred his wife, Laurette Taylor, on Broadway in one of her greatest stage triumphs.
Vault Corporation v Quaid Software Ltd. 847 F.2d 255 is a case heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that tested the extent of software copyright. The court held that making RAM copies as an essential step in utilizing software was permissible under §117 of the Copyright Act even if they are used for a purpose that the copyright holder did not intend. It also applied the "substantial noninfringing uses" test from Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. to hold that Quaid's software, which defeated Vault's copy protection mechanism, did not make Quaid liable for contributory infringement. It held that Quaid's software was not a derivative work of Vault's software, despite having approximately 30 characters of source code in common. Finally, it held that the Louisiana Software License Enforcement Act clause permitting a copyright holder to prohibit software decompilation or disassembly was preempted by the Copyright Act, and was therefore unenforceable.
The copyright law of the United States is intended to encourage the creation of art and culture by rewarding authors and artists with a set of exclusive rights. Copyright law grants authors and artists the exclusive right to make and sell copies of their works, the right to create derivative works, and the right to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time limit, and generally expire 70 years after the author's death. In the United States, any music composed before January 1, 1924, is generally considered public domain.
MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc and Vivendi Games, Inc., 629 F.3d 928, is a case decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. At the district court level, MDY had been found liable under theories of copyright and tort law for selling software that contributed to the breach of Blizzard's End User License Agreement (EULA) and Terms of Use (TOU) governing the World of Warcraft software.
The court's ruling was appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which reversed the district court in part, upheld in part, and remanded for further proceedings. The Court of Appeals ruled that for a software licensee's violation of a contract to constitute copyright infringement, there must be a nexus between the license condition and the licensor’s exclusive rights of copyright. However, the court also ruled, contrary to Chamberlain v. Skylink, that a finding of circumvention under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not require a nexus between circumvention and actual copyright infringement.
Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc. was a case in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington regarding the applicability of the first-sale doctrine to software sold under the terms of so-called "shrinkwrap licensing." The court held that when the transfer of software to the purchaser materially resembled a sale it was, in fact, a "sale with restrictions on use" giving rise to a right to resell the copy under the first-sale doctrine. As such, Autodesk could not pursue an action for copyright infringement against Vernor, who sought to resell used versions of its software on eBay. The decision was appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which issued a decision on September 10, 2010, reversing the first-sale doctrine ruling and remanding for further proceedings on the misuse of copyright claim. The Ninth Circuit's decision asserted that its ruling was compelled by Ninth Circuit precedent, but observed that the policy considerations involved in the case might affect motion pictures and libraries as well as sales of used software.
Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317, was a U.S. Court of Appeals Federal Circuit case involving Harold L. Bowers and Baystate Technologies over patent infringement, copyright infringement, and breach of contract. In the case, the court found that Baystate had breached their contract by reverse engineering Bower's program, something expressly prohibited by a shrink wrap license that Baystate entered into upon purchasing a copy of Bower's software. This case is notable for establishing that license agreements can preempt fair use rights as well as expand the rights of copyright holders beyond those codified in US federal law.
Asset Marketing Systems, Inc. v. Gagnon was a case heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit regarding implied licenses to use, modify and retain the source code of computer programs, and the enforceability of non-competition agreements. The court affirmed the ruling from the United States District Court for the Southern District of California that Kevin Gagnon, a software contractor doing business as "Mr. Computer", had implicitly granted Asset Marketing Systems (AMS) an unlimited license to use, modify and retain the source code of the programs that Gagnon created. The case is notable because the Court held that an implied software license is granted when the licensee requests the creation of a work, the licensor creates and delivers the work, and the licensor intends the licensee to copy and distribute the work.
F.B.T. Productions, LLC, et al. v. Aftermath Records, et al. 621 F.3d 958 was a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dealt with how Federal Copyright Law applied to the sales and licensing contracts of music downloads and other downloadable copyrighted material. Specifically, the circuit court ruled that a licensing provision in the contract between F.B.T. Productions and Aftermath Records unambiguously applied to permanent downloads and mastertones offered through third party distributors. After reviewing the First Sale Doctrine and the nature of Aftermath's contracts with its distributors, the circuit court concluded that such downloads constituted a licensing of copyrights rather than a sale, causing Aftermath to pay higher royalties to F.B.T. under their agreement.
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Redd Horne, Inc., was a copyright infringement case of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit over the playing video cassettes in-store of a video sale and rental store. The appeals court affirmed the decision of the district court to grant the plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment and enjoin defendants from exhibiting plaintiffs' copyrighted motion pictures.
Fox Broadcasting Co. v. Dish Network, LLC is a copyright case in which the United States District Court for the Central District of California, by granting partial summary judgment, denied most parts of the copyright claims presented by Fox Broadcasting Company (Fox) against Dish Network (Dish) for its service, a DVR-like device that allowed users to record programming that could be accessed later through any Internet-connected device. The service offered by Dish also allowed users to record any or all Fox's prime-time programs and to automatically skips commercials (AutoHop).
Metro. Reg'l Info. Sys., Inc. v. Am. Home Realty Network, Inc., 722 F.3d 591 (2013)., was a United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit case in which a court held two issues:
- The copyright owner of a collective work, such as an automated database, was not required by a pre-suit copyright registration requirement to identify names of creators and titles of individual work.
- By clicking yes to the term of use and uploading photograph, is sufficient to writing component in assignment of right under 17 U.S.C. § 204
FTC v. Motion Picture Advertising Service Co., 344 U.S. 392 (1953), was a 1953 decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that, where exclusive output contracts used by one company "and the three other major companies have foreclosed to competitors 75 percent of all available outlets for this business throughout the United States" the practice is "a device which has sewed up a market so tightly for the benefit of a few [that it] falls within the prohibitions of the Sherman Act, and is therefore an 'unfair method of competition' " under § 5 of the FTC Act. In so ruling, the Court extended the analysis under § 3 of the Clayton Act of requirements contracts that it made in the Standard Stations case to output contracts brought under the Sherman or FTC Acts.
In the early 1930s, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster developed the fictional comic book character of Superman. In 1938, they sold the character to Detective Comics, Inc.. After Superman became a great success, the pair attempted to recover the rights to the character. This began a long chain of legal battles over ownership, royalties, and credit that would continue after their deaths.
Joint authorship of a copyrightable work is when two or more persons contribute enough to the work to be the author of that work. In the case of joint authorship, the authors share the copyright in the work with each other.
