Copyright infringement is a serious offense that can result in significant damages. One common mistake in copyright cases is that a complaint has not properly identified all of the works infringed, or the complaint identifies a plaintiff who has no standing to bring a claim. Further, in order to estimate your or your client's potential liabilities or amount of money a client may be entitled to receive, counsel should first identify the copyrighted works that have been infringed. This can be tricky, but with the help of this post, you should be able to do it.
Counsel should consider the multiple categories copyrights that may or may not have been infringed. For example, in a music case, a complaint may focus on a singular claim, but reference multiple copyrights (e.g., "song" and "record" - which are separate works), including:
- The specific underlying musical or literary work (i.e., the composition, song, or words)
- Sound recordings of the underlying work
- Audiovisual recordings of the underlying music or literary work and/or sound recordings
- Album artwork
- Trademarks and/or rights of publicity (we won't get into this because it is beyond the scope of copyright infringement damages, but at times there are other damages of concern which are in addition to copyright infringement claims).
Given that separate rights are accorded to each of the above examples, the parties will need to investigate authorship and ownership of all of the potential rights infringed before concluding to which works the plaintiff has standing to bring damages and other legal claims. At minimum:
- Procure or create a list of works potentially copied, including dates of creation, publication, renewal/extension, grant termination notification and grant termination, if applicable (to make sure the rights have not fallen into the public domain and in fact the chain of title supports the plaintiff's standing to make a claim)
- Obtain a copy of the infinged work(s) that were potentially copied (besides understanding what category of work(s) were copied, it may be useful later, in investigating whether the nature of an infringement was willful, to note whether the original work bore any copyright notices)
- Examine examples of the potentially infringing copies to identify which works were in fact copied (for example, in a musical case, were both the composition and the recording copied, or was it solely the composition which was re-recorded?)
- Obtain copies of all available agreements covering and notices of intent to use the works potentially copied. If the agreements were verbal, ask questions to understand the intention of the agreement and what consideration was exchanged and actions were taken to support the claims of such intentions.
- If the agreement mentions that the work is a "work-for-hire," analyze whether the legal criteria were technically met for the work to be deemed a work for hire as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101 (because it is not a work-for-hire merely because an agreement states so).
- Search the Internet to identify prior public copyright claims and uses
- Search for and obtain records of copyright registration, copyright grant termination notices. In the United States, the Copyright Office this year launched the Copyright Public Records System (CPRS) pilot, which will provide enhanced search capabilities as part of its modernization efforts. To participate in the pilot program and gain access to the latest search tools, users must attend a webinar, which can be found here.
While we do frequently assist legal counsel with such investigation, there are legal experts in chain-of-title research, so this may be something best outsourced to a specialist if you are unfamilliar with it.
If you are counsel to one or more plaintiffs, list the correct entities as the plaintiffs in your complaint, including any companies owned by your client(s), which may hold some of the relevant rights. Unfortunately for plaintiffs with loan-out companies, there may be certain drawbacks if the plaintiff is an entity as opposed to an individual.
Typically, either our engagement stops here because we learn that a plaintiff has no standing to make a copyright infringement claim, or the scope of the matter multiplies if we determine that the number of works infringed was greater than the plaintiff originally identified.
