Articles Posted in Copyright

On Thursday, March 10, 2022, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a verdict favoring Google in a lawsuit brought by song lyrics website Genius. The lawsuit claimed that Google was displaying transcribed lyrics scraped by Google from Genius in search results in violation of Genius's copyright.

A federal judge declined to grant summary judgment to the pop singer in a copyright infringement case, finding that there were significant similarities between the lyrics of "Shake It Off" and a song written by the plaintiffs.

The pop singer and songwriter seeks damages of $1 million or more in a lawsuit over royalty agreements signed during her divorce from Sonny Bono.

On October 8, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld summary judgment entered in favor of singer Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye. The summary judgment entered in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, concerned a copyright infringement claim alleging that The Weeknd's song A Lonely Night copied Brian Clover and Scott McCulloch's song I Need to Love.

A federal judge ruled that Oprah did not have plausible access to the allegedly infringed memoir, nor did her TV series resemble the memoir with sufficient precision to justify a finding of liability.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling on Friday, March 26, 2021, holding that Andy Warhol's series of prints depicting the musical artist Prince are not transformative fair use under copyright law. The three-judge panel further ruled that Warhol's prints and Lynn Goldsmith's photograph, the source material for Warhol's prints, are substantially similar as a matter of law.

Kevin Wooten, an English teacher in North Carolina, has sued Netflix for alleged copyright infringement related to its show “Outer Banks.” Wooten wrote a novel called “Pennywise:  The Hunt for Blackbeard’s Treasure” in 2016. He argues that Netflix stole material from his book for “Outer Banks,” based on parallels between the…

On Thursday, July 2, 2020, Grammy award-winning composer and musician Maria Schneider filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, against YouTube, LLC, Google, LLC, and Alphabet, Inc. The lawsuit concerns copyright piracy on YouTube and alleges that YouTube's copyright management tool, Content ID, "actually insulates the vast majority of known and repeated copyright infringers from YouTube's repeat infringer policy" and leaves plaintiffs in the class with "no meaningful ability to police the extensive infringement of their copyrighted work." The complaint requests, among other things, equitable relief in the form of providing Content ID to all copyright owners and monetary relief in the form of defendants' profits derived from copyright infringement on YouTube.

The U.S. Congress plans to update the Digital Millennium Copyright Act later this year. A lengthy report produced by the U.S. Copyright Office suggests that this update may enhance protections for rights holders.

Ubisoft argues that the American tech giants should have removed a mobile game from their digital marketplaces that infringed on the popular Rainbow Six Siege game.