The 20th Century Fox Film Corporation had sued the Dastar Corporation for using footage from a 1950s television documentary on World War II without attribution in its current video series World War II Campaigns in Europe. The 8-to-0 decision overturned a lower court’s $1.5-million judgment against Dastar, the Associated Press reported June 2.
The American Library Association’s Washington Office calls the court’s decision extremely helpful to supporters of balanced intellectual-property laws. ALA, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association had filed amici curiae briefs in the case in February. “It makes clear that the public domain is public, that once something goes into the public domain you can’t yank it back into the private sphere,” said Washington attorney Jonathan Band, who represented the library groups. “That’s very important to libraries and researchers and anybody engaged in second-generation activity.”
ALA—along with ARL, AALL, and other groups—has also filed amici briefs in two other intellectual-property cases. In Baystate Technologies, Inc. v. Bowers, now on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the groups sought to overturn a ruling that federal copyright law does not preempt a shrinkwrap contract prohibiting reverse engineering.
In FareChase Inc. v. American Airlines, the brief argues for the right to make transformative uses of facts and against shrinkwrap terms that attempt to limit the right to use facts. American sued the company for developing software for travel agents that mines flight and fare information from airline websites without their consent.
Posted June 9, 2003.