fair use – Attorney Evan Brown

February 7, 2024 Copyright

Not fair use after all – Fourth Circuit reverses lower court’s decision in online copyright infringement case

fair use

Plaintiff photographer sued defendant news website for copyright infringement over a photo of Ted Nugent that defendant used in an online article. The lower court granted summary judgment for defendant, finding that its use of the photo was fair use. Plaintiff sought review with the Fourth Circuit. On review, the court reversed, applying the factors set out in 17 U.S.C. § 107 in finding the use of the photo was not fair use.

For the first fair use factor, the court found that defendant’s use of the photo was not transformative and was commercial. This caused the factor to weigh against fair use. It looked to the recent Supreme Court case of Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508 (2023). The court noted that in a manner similar to what happened in the Warhol case, plaintiff took the photo of Ted Nugent to capture a “portrait” of him, and defendant used the photo to “depict” the musician. Accordingly, the two uses “shared substantially the same purpose.” The court actually found that defendant in this case had “less of a case” for transformative use than the Andy Warhol Foundation did, because unlike in Warhol, defendant did not alter or add new expression beyond cropping negative space. And though the article in which the photo appeared did not generate much revenue for defendant, the relevant question to determine commercial use was whether defendant stood to profit, not whether it actually did profit.

Though the district court did not address the second and third fair use factors, the appellate court looked at those factors, and found they did not support fair use. Looking at the nature of plaintiff’s photo, the court observed that plaintiff made several creative choices in capturing the photo, including angle of photography, exposure, composition, framing, location, and exact moment of creation. As for the third factor, the court found it to weigh against fair use because defendant copied a significant percentage of the photo, only cropping out negative space while keeping the photo’s expressive features.

Finally, the court also found that the fourth fair use factor weighed against fair use. The court concluded that if defendant’s unauthorized use became “uninterrupted and widespread,” it would adversely affect the potential market for the photo. It emphasized the notion of the potential market. In this case, there was at least one instance where plaintiff had allowed use of his photo for free, and he also made it available for free subject to a Creative Commons license, requiring attribution in return. But that did not change the outcome, given that he customarily licensed if for either money or attribution.

Philpot v. Independent Journal Review, — F.4th —, 2024 WL 442066 (4th Cir., February 6, 2024)

See also:

Ted Nugent photo by Republic Country Club, under this Creative Commons license. Changes made: frame expanded, image color modified and background enhanced using generative AI.

December 10, 2018 Copyright

Willie Nelson meme on Facebook was not clearly fair use

Plaintiff photographer sued website publisher (who also maintained a Facebook page to go with the website) for copyright infringement. Plaintiff claimed defendant infringed plaintiff’s copyright in a photo plaintiff took of Willie Nelson when defendant posted the photo on Facebook with a cultural message superimposed over the photo in the form of a meme.

Defendant moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim, on the basis of fair use. The court denied the motion, applying the fair use test set forth in 17 USC 109.

The court’s holding turned essentially on the idea that there were not yet enough facts in the record to support a finding of fair use, and that such a determination should be made later in the case, e.g., at summary judgment. For example, plaintiff had argued that defendant’s purpose was not transformative, and that it was in fact the same purpose plaintiff had for publishing the photo, namely, to identify Willie Nelson.

Philpot v. Alternet Media, Inc., 2018 WL 6267876 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 30, 2018)

August 23, 2017 Copyright

YouTubers get fair use win in copyright suit brought over reaction video

Plaintiff makes videos and posts them to YouTube. Defendants took snippets of one of plaintiff’s videos, interspersed those snippets with their own commentary about the content of those snippets, and posted that to their YouTube channel. Plaintiff sued for copyright infringement. Defendants moved for summary judgment, arguing they were entitled to the affirmative defense of fair use.

The court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment. It found that “[a]ny review of the defendants’ video leaves no doubt that it constitutes critical commentary of the [plaintiff’s] video.” It also found there is “no doubt that the [defendants’] video is decidedly not a market substitute for the plaintiff’s video.” Leaning on these elements – the first and fourth elements of the Copyright Act’s four-factor analysis – the court found in favor of defendants on their fair use defense.

Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, No. 16-CV-3081 (S.D.N.Y., August 23, 2017)

More coverage at TechCrunch.

About the Author: Evan Brown is a Chicago technology and intellectual property attorney. Call Evan at (630) 362-7237, send email to ebrown [at] internetcases.com, or follow him on Twitter @internetcases. Read Evan’s other blog, UDRP Tracker, for information about domain name disputes.

July 24, 2014 Copyright

When is news reporting fair use under copyright law?

Blogger claims fair use supports his challenge to DMCA takedown of YouTube video. But “news reporting” aspect of fair use can be tricky.

An embattled California pastor sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube over a video clip that a blogger used “to report accurately the relationship” between two organizations. The blogger sent a counternotification and explained that he believes copyright fair use protects him against the takedown (and apparently against infringement as well).

The blogger invokes, among other things, the news reporting aspect of fair use, which one finds set forth in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. A recent fair use case, Swatch Group Management Services Ltd. v. Bloomberg, 742 F. 3d 17 (2d Cir. 2014) might shed some interesting light on how news reporting plays into the analysis. In that case, the court found that defendant was protected by fair use when it distributed an audio recording of a company’s earnings call. Unlike many fair use cases, in which the analysis under the first factor (purpose and character of the use) becomes a question of whether the subsequent use is “transformative,” the court observes the following:

In the context of news reporting and analogous activities … the need to convey information to the public accurately may in some instances make it desirable and consonant with copyright law for a defendant to faithfully reproduce an original work rather than transform it.

A defendant may in some circumstances provide transformative material along with the faithful reproduction of an original work. But the absence of that transformative material will not disqualify a defendant from showing fair use:

[B]y disseminating not just a written transcript or article but an actual sound recording, [defendant] was able to convey with precision not only what [plaintiff’s] executives said, but also how they said it. This latter type of information may be just as valuable … as the former, since a speaker’s demeanor, tone, and cadence can often elucidate his or her true beliefs far beyond what a stale transcript or summary can show.

So we see that the news reporting aspect of fair use can be conceptually separated from transformative use.

There is a slippery slope risk here, and the court recognized that. It cited to the Supreme Court’s Harper & Row decision to observe that “[t]he promise of copyright would be an empty one if it could be avoided merely by dubbing the infringement a fair use ‘news report'”. In this case, however, the “independent informational value inherent in a faithful recording” carried the day. From this we see a rule or guide: use of a piece of content is more likely to be newsworthy if the piece of content itself, and not just the raw information within the content, is a news event.

Evan Brown is an attorney in Chicago advising clients on matters dealing with technology, the internet and new media.

February 20, 2014 Trademarks

Fair use is a trademark concept as well

Ninth Circuit finds trademark fair use of name of online music site.

Webceleb is a “social marketplace for independent music.” It sued several defendants over the use of the term “web celeb” in connection with a television show award category and a section of an entertainment website. Defendants moved for summary judgment and the trial court granted the motion. Plaintiff sought review with the Ninth Circuit. On appeal, the court affirmed the award of summary judgment.

The court held that defendants’ use of the term “web celeb” was a classic fair use because:

the use of the mark was not a trademark use;
the use was fair and in good faith; and
the use was only descriptive

There was no trademark use because the term “web celeb” (at least according to the court) is “common parlance” for internet celebrities, which was what the award category was intended to recognize. And the use of “web celeb” in connection with the electronic magazine was merely descriptive of the online magazine’s content. The use was in good faith, as the evidence showed defendants were unaware of plaintiff’s mark when they created the “straightforward, descriptive title.”

The court came close to blaming the plaintiff for its own trademark woes:

Any minimal confusion here is the “risk the plaintiff accepted when it decided to identify its product with a mark that uses a well known descriptive phrase.” (Citing KP Permanent Make–Up, Inc. v. Lasting Impression I, Inc., 543 U.S. 111, 121–22 (2004))

That should serve as an instruction to all trademark adopters: While descriptive marks may do a good job of conveying information about a product, for the same reason the trademark owner may not enjoy as much protected exclusivity in the mark.

Webceleb, Inc. v. Procter & Gamble Co., 2014 WL 448648 (9th Cir. February 5, 2014)

November 22, 2013 Copyright

Copyright and the JFK Assassination

Fifty years ago today, which was of course long before smartphones with cameras, Abraham Zapruder filmed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy using his 8 millimeter color home movie camera. Not only did the Zapruder film become iconic, its subsequent treatment formed the basis for a later copyright case that presented some interesting issues.

A few days after the assassination, in exchange for $150,000, Zapruder assigned the copyright in the film to Life Magazine (actually its parent company Time Inc.). In 1967, Josiah Thompson wrote a book about the assassination that contained charcoal sketches copied from frames of the Zapruder film.

Time sued for copyright infringement. Defendants moved for summary judgment. The court granted the motion.

Among other things, defendants argued that the frames from the Zapruder film were not entitled to copyright protection in the first place because they lacked originality. The court rejected this argument, noting that:

The Zapruder pictures in fact have many elements of creativity. Among other things, Zapruder selected the kind of camera (movies, not snapshots), the kind of film (color), the kind of lens (telephoto), the area in which the pictures were to be taken, the time they were to be taken, and (after testing several sites) the spot on which the camera would be operated.

The case also had a fair use component. As is still the reality 50 years later, the court observed that “the [fair use] doctrine is entirely equitable and is so flexible as virtually to defy definition.” It cited an earlier decision that called the issue “the most troublesome in the whole law of copyright.”

The fair use analysis is particularly interesting in that it took place, obviously, before the 1976 Copyright Act, which codified the now well-known fair use factors. But it looked to the same language that is now in Section 107 of the Act, which then was merely a passed Hose Bill (H.R. 2512) but still under consideration by the Senate. It wasn’t until more than 10 years later that the factors actually became codified.

The court held that the fair use factors went in defendants’ favor. It noted the substantial public interest in having the fullest information available. And it concluded that people bought the book not for the Zapruder pictures, but because of the theory and explanation set forth in it, supported by the Zapruder pictures. Moreover, there was little, if any, injury to the copyright owner. There was no competition between plaintiff and defendants. And here is a theme that persists to this day, even as recently as the Google Book Search decision: “It seems more reasonable to speculate that the Book would, if anything, enhance the value of the copyrighted work; it is difficult to see any decrease in its value.”

Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Associates, 293 F.Supp. 130 (D.C.N.Y 1968)

November 15, 2013 Copyright

What the Google Book Search fair use decision means for innovators

(This is a slightly modified cross-post from my firm’s blog.)

Yesterday the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted Google’s motion for summary judgment in the 8-year-running Google Book Search case. The court held that Google’s copying and display of in-copyright books is a noninfringing fair use. The decision is a signal that modern copyright law, despite its many flaws that become apparent in the digital age, will make at least some room for technological innovation.

About the Case

In 2004, Google announced plans to scan the full text of millions of books, both in the public domain and in-copyright, and to make those scanned works searchable on the web. For in-copyright works, Google would make “snippets,” each comprised of 1/8 of a page, available as search results for keywords contained within them.

Plaintiffs (some individual authors and the Authors Guild) sued Google in 2005 for copyright infringement. The parties reached a settlement agreement in 2008, but the court later rejected that agreement. Earlier this year, plaintiffs suffered a setback when the Second Circuit held that a class action was not appropriate because of the fact-specific fair use questions.

Back at the trial court level, the parties cross-moved for summary judgment. Google argued, as it had from the outset, that the scanning and display is a noninfringing fair use. The court granted Google’s summary judgment motion.

The Court’s Decision

Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement. Section 107 of the Copyright Act guides a court on how to determine whether a defendant’s use is fair. That provision instructs that it is not copyright infringement if one uses another’s work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” It goes on to provide that a court should apply four non-exhaustive factors in the fair use analysis:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In this case, the court began its fair use analysis by emphasizing how “[c]opyright law seeks to [provide] sufficient protection to authors and inventors to stimulate creative activity, while at the same time permitting others to utilize protected works to advance the progress of the arts and sciences.”

In applying the fair use factors, the court focused extensively on the first factor (purpose and character of the use). In this analysis, the court looked to the key question of whether the use was “transformative.” Borrowing from the Supreme Court, the court looked to whether Google’s scanning and display of the works “superseded” or “supplanted” the original creation, or whether the conduct:

instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message; it asks, in other words, whether and to what extent the new work is “transformative.”

The court found the use to be transformative, comparing the “snippets” to thumbnail images, which were found to be protected by fair use in a 2003 case (Kelly v. Arriba Soft) involving an image search engine. Moreover, the court’s opinion noted the extensive benefits occasioned by Google’s efforts, including:

The creation of new and efficient ways for readers and researchers to find books.
The increased ability to conduct “data mining” or “text mining” research. For example, using the tool, researchers can examine word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers to consider how literary style has changed over time.
The expansion of access to books. In particular, the court noted how traditionally underserved populations will benefit as they gain knowledge of and access to far more books. Digitization facilitates the conversion of books to audio and tactile formats, increasing access for individuals with disabilities.
The preservation and “new life” of old and out of print books.

The court acknowledged the idea that Google was engaged in commercial activity through the scanning project. But such fact was not dispositive to the fair use finding. Given the nature of the benefits, the court was satisfied that the purpose and character of the use supported a fair use finding.

On the second fair use factor, the court found that because the works were already published and were non-fiction, the balance tilted in favor of fair use.

The third factor came out “slightly” in Google’s favor. While a copying of all of a work will generally weigh against the defendant in considering the “amount and substantiality of the portion used,” the fact that the search feature would not function properly had the entire work not been scanned, put this factor on Google’s side.

Finally, on the fourth fair use factor — effect on the market — the court rejected plaintiff’s arguments that the scanning and display will negatively affect the sale of plaintiff’s works. Google does not sell the scanned copies, nor would it be feasible or practicable for a user to obtain an entire copy of the work through an assemblage of snippets. In fact, the court noted how the platform will help readers and researchers identify books, thus benefiting authors and publishers. From this, the court found, Google Books will generate new audiences and create new sources of income.

What This Says About Innovation and the Law

Google’s use of technology in this situation was disruptive. It challenged the expectation of copyright holders, who used copyright law to challenge that disruption. It bears noting that in the court’s analysis, it assumed that copyright infringement had taken place. But since fair use is an affirmative defense, it considered whether Google had carried its burden of showing that the circumstances warranted a finding that the use was fair. In this sense, fair use serves as a backstop against copyright ownership extremism. Under these particular circumstances — where Google demonstrated incredible innovation — that backstop provided room for the innovation to take root and grow. Technological innovators should be encouraged.

Fair use questions defeat class certification in Google Book Search case

Last year, the district court judge overseeing the Google Book Search case certified the plaintiff-authors as a class in the action the Authors Guild filed against Google in 2005. Google opposed the motion for class certification, and sought review of the issue with the Second Circuit. On appeal, the court vacated the class certification, holding that such certification was premature, given Google’s anticipated fair use arguments. The per curiam opinion provided that:

we believe that the resolution of Google’s fair use defense in the first instance will necessarily inform and perhaps moot our analysis of many class certification issues, including those regarding the commonality of plaintiffs’ injuries, the typicality of their claims, and the predominance of common questions of law or fact

Given that fair use is a fact-specific analysis, this decision seems sensible. And the decision gives Google a powerful new lever in settlement talks — litigation of the copyright claims on the merits just got a lot more expensive for the Authors Guild plaintiffs.

Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., — F.3d —, 2013 WL 3286232 (2nd Cir. July 1, 2013)

Fair use, the DMCA, and presidential politics

The 2012 presidential election cycle is already giving internet law enthusiasts things to talk about. Last week it was Ron Paul’s grumblings about an unauthorized campaign ad on YouTube. Now NBC is moaning about a Mitt Romney ad comprised almost entirely of Tom Brokaw on the Nightly News in 1997.

NBC has asked the ad be pulled, claiming it is a copyright infringement. Smart people are already saying the ad is fair use. It probably is fair use.

And NBC knows that. Romney’s campaign posted the ad on YouTube five days ago, and it is yet to be the subject of a DMCA takedown notice. Though such a notice would be easy to draft and send, NBC is aware that the fallout could be expensive. Section 512(f) of the DMCA penalizes the senders of bogus takedown notices. And the courts have not taken kindly to purported victims of infringement who do not fully consider fair use before having content taken off YouTube.

With the election still months away, we may yet see controversial action like we did in 2008 by the news media to disable political content. These situations underscore the problem presented by how long it takes to process DMCA counternotifications and 512(f) actions.

A candidate’s defeat makes these processes moot. So maybe we should hope for a longer republican primary season just so we can see some good DMCA and fair use litigation. Come on NBC, send that takedown notice!

Google Book Search case settles

Three years after it was filed, much of that time existing in apparent dormancy, the copyright infringement case filed by the Authors Guild against Google Book Search (f/k/a Google Print) has settled. (Thanks to Greg Beck for alerting me to this via a post he put up on Twitter.)

Here is a page with all kinds of information about the settlement. It’s a complicated proposed agreement, so it will take some time to understand it. There is sure to be plenty of commentary from others in the blogosphere over the next day or so.

It’s good to see this resolved. Almost three years ago I was on a panel discussion at the John Marshall Law School talking about the fair use implications of the case. You can download the MP3 of that talk here.