Case Law & Judicial Opinions

• Virgin Records America, Inc v. Thomas Jury verdict in favor of RIAA - $220,000 judgment against Minnesota woman for making music files available via Kazaa, despite her denials of doing so.
• Chang v. Virgin Mobile, Creative Commons Corporation
  Use My Photo? Not Without Permission Photograph of a minor posted on Flickr, under the Creative Commons License, used by Virgin Australia in an ad campaign, seen by plaintiff as a violation of privacy. On the Texas suit against Virgin and Creative Commons - Lawrence Lessig
• Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., No. CV 04-9484, United States District Court Central District of California (2006). Google's creation and public display of "thumbnails" likely do directly infringe P10's copyrights as part of a preliminary injunction decision.
• Field v. Google, Inc., No. CV-S-04-0412-RCJ-LRL, United States District Court District of Nevada (2006). Google did not infringe on Field's copyright by indexing and caching his online story. Website owners can use meta tags or robots.txt files to keep a search engine from indexing a particular page. Also Google's use of the materials in their database was fair use.
• Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley Limited, Dorling Kindersley Publishing, and RR Donnelley & Sons Company, No. 05-2514-cv, United States Court of Appeals (2nd Cir.), 2006. Copyrighted images used in book were fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107. The case balances a number of factors, including the purpose of the use of the copyrighted work, how it is presented (reduced size photos), and the market harm to other uses of the work.
• Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, INC., No. 94-1778 6th Cir. 1996 decision vacated
  • Additional Documents, Coursepacks and Information
• American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1995)
• Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (9th Cir. 2003)
• Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F.Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991)
• Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 510 U.S. 569 (1994)
• Capitol Records, Inc. v. Foster
• Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989)
• Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003).
• Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003).
• Encyclopedia Britannica Educ. Corp. v. Crooks, 558 F. Supp. 1247 (W.D.N.Y. 1983)
• Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
• Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc., 510 U.S. 517 (1994)
• Greenberg v. National Geographic Society
  • Ordered reheard, previous decision vacated, August 30 2007
  • Reversed and Remanded, June 13 2007
  • Opinion, March 22 2001
  Gulf Oil Corp. v. Copp Paving Co., 419 U.S. 186 (1974)
• Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 105 S.Ct. 2218 (1985)
• International Bhd. of Elec. Workers v. NLRB, 814 F.2d 697 (D.C. Cir. 1987)
• Los Angeles News Service v. Tullo, 973 F.2d 791 (9th Cir. 1992)
• MacMillan Co. v. King, 223 F. 862 (D. Mass. 1914)
• Marcus v. Rowley, 695 F.2d 1171 (9th Cir. 1983)
• In the Matter of Misrepresentation of Consumer Fair Use and Related Rights
  By National Football League, NFL Properties, Inc., NFL Enteprises LLC
  and Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Advanced Media, LP and NBC Universal, Inc., Universal Studios, Inc., and Morgan Creek Productions, Inc. and DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc., DreamWorks LLC, a Viacom property and Harcourt Inc. and  Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
• National Rifle Ass'n of America v. Handgun Control Fed'n, 15 F.3d 559 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 115 S.Ct. 71 (1994)
• New York Times Co., Inc. v. Tasini, 531 U.S. 483 (2001).
• Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)
• Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990)
• Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151 (1975)
• West Virginia Univ. Hosps., Inc. v. Casey, 499 U.S. 83 (1991)
• Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States, 487 F.2d 1345, aff'd by an equally divided court, 420 U.S. 376, 95 S.Ct. 1344 (1975)
  
• Selected Historic Copyright Decisions at Cornell Law School
• All US Supreme Court Decisions from Justia, Oyez and US Court Forms