Landmark Copyright Cases

Why This Matters

Copyright law isn't just about who owns what—it's about drawing the line between protecting creators and ensuring the public can build on existing ideas. Every case you'll study here answered a fundamental question: When does borrowing become stealing? When does protection become monopoly? These rulings established the doctrines you're being tested on: originality requirements, fair use factors, transformative use, and secondary liability. Understanding these cases means understanding how courts actually apply the abstract principles from your textbook.

Don't just memorize case names and dates. For each decision, know what legal test it created or refined, which fair use factor it emphasized, and how it shifted the balance between rights holders and the public. When you see an exam question about whether a particular use qualifies as fair use, these cases are your analytical toolkit. The courts built copyright doctrine one ruling at a time—and you need to trace that construction to answer FRQs effectively.

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Defining What Copyright Protects

Before courts can decide if someone infringed a copyright, they must determine whether the work deserves protection in the first place. These cases establish the threshold requirements—originality and creative expression—that separate copyrightable works from mere facts or ideas.

Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991)

• Originality is constitutionally required—the Supreme Court held that copyright demands a "modicum of creativity," not just effort or investment
• The "sweat of the brow" doctrine was rejected, meaning labor alone doesn't create copyright; alphabetized phone listings failed the creativity threshold
• Facts themselves are never copyrightable—only the original selection, coordination, or arrangement of facts can qualify for protection

Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation (1930)

• Established the "levels of abstraction" test—Judge Learned Hand explained that as you strip away specific expression, you eventually reach unprotectable ideas
• Substantial similarity requires comparing protected expression, not general themes, stock characters, or plot structures common to a genre
• Ideas and expression exist on a spectrum—the more abstract the element, the less protection it receives (this distinction appears constantly on exams)

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The Fair Use Doctrine: Core Applications

Fair use is copyright's safety valve, permitting unauthorized uses that serve important social purposes. Courts weigh four statutory factors: purpose and character of use, nature of the original work, amount used, and market effect. These cases show how courts balance those factors in practice.

Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (1984)

• Time-shifting for personal use is fair use—recording TV shows to watch later serves a legitimate, noncommercial purpose that doesn't harm the market
• Established the "substantial noninfringing use" test for devices; if a technology has legitimate uses, selling it isn't contributory infringement
• Commercial harm must be demonstrated, not assumed—copyright holders couldn't just speculate about market damage from VCRs

Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises (1985)

• Unpublished works receive stronger protection—the author's right to control first publication weighs heavily in fair use analysis
• Even small takings can be unfair if they capture the "heart" of the work; 300 words from Ford's memoir were qualitatively significant
• Commercial purpose cuts against fair use, especially when the use directly competes with the copyright holder's planned exploitation

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (1994)

• Transformative use is the key to fair use analysis—the more a new work adds meaning, message, or expression, the stronger the fair use claim
• Commercial parody can qualify as fair use; 2 Live Crew's version of "Pretty Woman" commented on the original, making it transformative
• Market harm analysis must consider the market for transformative works, not just direct substitutes—parodies rarely replace originals

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Fair Use in the Digital Age

Digital technology created new copyright battlegrounds. These cases adapted traditional fair use principles to mass digitization, search engines, and software development—contexts the 1976 Copyright Act never anticipated.

Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. (2015)

• Mass digitization can be transformative—Google's book scanning created a searchable database serving a different purpose than reading the books
• Snippet views don't substitute for purchasing; the court found Google's limited display actually increased book sales by helping readers discover works
• Public benefit matters in fair use analysis—expanding access to knowledge supported finding the use fair despite its massive commercial scale

Oracle America, Inc. v. Google LLC (2021)

• Declaring code in APIs may be copyrightable, but reimplementing it can still be fair use when it enables interoperability and innovation
• Transformative use applies to software—Google used Java's API structure to build something new (Android), not to replace Java itself
• The creative nature of code doesn't preclude fair use; functional elements receive less protection than purely expressive works

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Secondary Liability: When Third Parties Are Responsible

Copyright holders can't always sue individual infringers—sometimes they target the platforms or technologies that enable infringement. These cases define when facilitating infringement creates legal liability.

Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (1984)

• The "staple article of commerce" doctrine protects technology sellers if their product has substantial noninfringing uses
• Mere capability of infringement isn't enough for contributory liability; VCRs could copy protected content but also enabled fair use time-shifting
• Knowledge of potential infringement doesn't create liability when legitimate uses exist—this principle shaped tech industry development for decades

MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. (2005)

• Inducement liability exists when companies actively encourage infringement—Grokster marketed itself as a tool for pirating music
• Intent to promote infringement matters; internal communications showing Grokster targeted former Napster users proved culpable intent
• Sony's protection doesn't apply when business models depend on infringement—substantial noninfringing uses can't shield deliberate bad actors

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Copyright Duration and Constitutional Limits

Congress controls how long copyrights last, but does the Constitution impose any limits? This case tested whether repeated term extensions violate the "limited times" requirement or the First Amendment.

Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003)

• Congress can extend existing copyrights without violating the "limited times" clause—the Court deferred to legislative judgment on duration
• Copyright doesn't violate the First Amendment because it contains built-in speech protections: the idea-expression dichotomy and fair use
• The public domain is not constitutionally guaranteed; works expected to enter public domain can be kept under copyright by new legislation

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The Limits of Transformative Use

Not every modification qualifies as transformative. This case shows that appropriation art must do more than simply recontextualize—it must add new meaning or message.

Rogers v. Koons (1992)

• Copying for profit without commentary isn't transformative—Koons reproduced a photograph as sculpture but added no critical perspective
• Commercial art appropriation faces high fair use barriers; using someone else's creative expression to make money requires strong justification
• Artists must license or transform, not just translate between media—changing a photo to sculpture wasn't enough without new meaning

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Quick Reference Table

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Self-Check Questions

1. Both Feist and Nichols define boundaries of copyright protection—what specific boundary does each case establish, and how would you use them together to analyze whether a work is protectable?

2. Compare the outcomes in Sony and Grokster: what factors explain why VCR manufacturers escaped liability while peer-to-peer software companies did not?

3. If an FRQ presents a scenario where someone copies an entire copyrighted work but uses it for a completely different purpose, which two cases provide the strongest support for a fair use argument, and why?

4. Harper & Row and Campbell both involved commercial uses of copyrighted material. Explain why commercial purpose was decisive in one case but not the other.

5. A tech company creates a tool that indexes copyrighted images to make them searchable, displaying only thumbnails. Using Authors Guild and Oracle, construct an argument for why this might qualify as fair use—then identify which factor from Rogers or Harper & Row might weaken that argument.