The Respondents in this case were freelance authors who wrote articles for a variety of publishers. The publishers engaged the authors as independent contractors under contracts that did not secure an author’s consent to placement of articles in an electronic database. However, the publishers each licensed rights to copy and sell articles to the owner and operator of NEXIS. The authors brought suit against the publishers. In response to the authors’ complaint, the publishers raised the privilege accorded collective work to copyright owners by §201(c) of the Copyright Act. The District Court granted the publishers summary judgment, The Second Circuit reversed on the ground that the databases were not among the collective works covered by §201(c), and specifically, were not “revisions” of the periodicals in which the articles first appeared. The Supreme Court held that Section 201(c) did not authorize the copying at issue here.

In 1977, former President Ford contracted with Harper & Row (H&R) to publish his as yet unwritten memoirs. Shortly before a previously agreed to Time Magazine excerpted release, an unauthorized source provided The Nation Magazine with the unpublished Ford manuscript. As a result of the publication of The Nation’s article, Time canceled its article. H&R then brought suit in Federal District Court against the publishers of The Nation, alleging violations of the Copyright Act (Act). The District Court held that the Ford memoirs were protected by copyright at the time of The Nation publication and that The Nation’s use of the copyrighted material constituted an infringement under the Act. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that The Nation’s publication of the 300 to 400 words it identified as copyrightable expression was sanctioned as a “fair use” of the copyrighted material under 107 of the Act. The Supreme Court held that The Nation’s article was not a “fair use” sanctioned by the fair use provisions in 17 USC 107.

The Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. 505, provides in relevant part that in any copyright infringement action “the court may . . . award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party as part of the costs.” The question presented in this case was what standards should inform a court’s decision to award attorney’s fees to a prevailing defendant in a copyright infringement action. After Fogerty’s successful defense of a copyright infringement action filed against him by respondent Fantasy, Inc., the District Court denied his motion for attorney’s fees pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 505. The Court of Appeals affirmed, declining to abandon it’s “dual standard” for awarding 505 fees – under which prevailing plaintiffs are generally awarded attorney’s fees as a matter of course, while defendants must show that the original suit was frivolous or brought in bad faith – in favor of the so-called “evenhanded” approach, in which no distinction is made between prevailing plaintiffs and prevailing defendants. The Supreme Court held that the Court of Appeals erroneously held the prevailing defendant, to a more stringent standard than that applicable to a prevailing plaintiff, and reversed and remanded the Court of Appeals Decision.

Rural Telephone Service Company and Feist Publications, Inc., are both publishers of telephone directories. When Rural refused to license its white pages listings to Feist for a directory covering 11 different telephone service areas, Feist extracted the listings it needed from Rural’s directory without Rural’s consent. Although Feist altered many of Rural’s listings, several were identical to listings in Rural’s white pages. The District Court granted summary judgment to Rural in its copyright infringement suit, holding that telephone directories are copyrightable. The Court of Appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeals holding that Rural’s white pages did not meet the constitutional or statutory requirements for copyright protection, stating that, originality, not “sweat of the brow,” is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. Raw data are uncopyrightable facts, and the way in which Rural selected, coordinated, and arranged those facts was not original in any way. Copyright rewards originality, not effort.

Petitioners, whose products or services build on copyrighted works that have gone into the public domain, brought this suit seeking a determination that the Copyright Term Extension Act (CETA) fails constitutional review under both the Copyright Clause’s “limited Times” prescription and the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee. The District Court held that the CTEA does not violate the Copyright Clause’s “limited times” restriction because the CTEA’s terms, though longer than the 1976 Act’s terms, are still limited, not perpetual, and therefore fit within Congress’ discretion. The court also held that there are no First Amendment rights to use the copyrighted works of others. The Circuit Court affirmed. The Supreme Court upheld the Circuit Court’s decision that placing existing and future copyrights in parity in the CTEA, Congress acted within its authority and did not transgress constitutional limitations.

The Supreme Court ruled that Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act does not prevent the unaccredited copying of an un-copyrighted work. The Lanham Act’s purpose is to prevent the deception of consumers and the impairment of producers’ good will.

The Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) and Reid, a sculptor, filed competing copyright registration certificates for a statue in Washington, D.C. The parties had never discussed copyright in the sculpture. The District Court ruled for CCNV in its subsequent suit seeking a determination of copyright ownership, holding that the statue was a “work made for hire” and was therefore owned exclusively by CCNV. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the sculpture was not a “work made for hire” under the first subsection of the 101 definition and that the statue did not satisfy the second subsection of the 101 definition, since sculpture is not one of the nine categories of “specially ordered or commissioned” works enumerated therein. However, the court remanded for a determination whether the statue was jointly authored by CCNV and Reid, such that they were co-owners of the copyright under 201(a). The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

Universal brought an action against Sony alleging that video tape recorder (VTRs) consumers had been recording some of Universal’s copyrighted works that had been exhibited on commercially sponsored television and thereby infringed on their copyrights, and further that Sony was liable for such copyright infringement because of their marketing of the VTRs. The District Court denied Universal all relief, holding that noncommercial home use recording of material broadcast over the public airwaves was a fair use of copyrighted works and did not constitute copyright infringement, and that Sony could not be held liable as contributory infringers even if the home use of a VTR was considered an infringing use. The Court of Appeals reversed. The Supreme Court reversed the opinion of the Appeals Court.