Outside the U.S. Copyright Office there is a sequence of display panels that summarize some major legal decisions about copyright law that have been decided by U.S. federal courts, including the Supreme Court. They illustrate how, over the years, legal precedents shape and clarify the law, and allow it to evolve into areas, such as photography, broadcasting, and computing that were not thought of when the Constitution was written and the laws enacted.
Even these major decisions can not be considered irrevocable. Many were never tested by the Supreme Court and could be reversed. Recently, a federal court made a ruling that explicitly disagreed with the King vs. Mr. Maestro, Inc. case listed below.
Wheaton vs. Peters, 1834. This landmark case, established the principle that copyright is not a kind of natural right but rather is the creation of the copyright statute and subject to the conditions it imposes.
Baker vs. Selden, 1880. This case established that copyright law protects what an author writes and the way ideas are expressed, but the law does not protect the ideas themselves.
Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. vs. Sarony, 1884. This decision expanded the scope of copyright to cover media other than text, in this case a photograph of Oscar Wilde.
Bleistein vs. Donaldson Lithographic Co., 1903. This case concerned three circus posters. The court decided that they were copyrightable, whether or not they had artistic value or were aesthetically pleasing.
Fred Fisher, Inc. vs. Dillingham, 1924. This dispute concerned the similarity in two musical passages. The court ruled that unconscious copying could result in an infringement of copyright.
Nichols vs. Universal Pictures Corp., 1931. The court ruled that it was not an infringement of copyright for a film to copy abstract ideas of plot and characters from a successful Broadway play.
Sheldon vs. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 1936. The court ruled that "no plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate."
G. Ricordi & Co. vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 1951. This was a case about how renewal rights and rights in derivative works should be interpreted, in this instance the novel Madame Butterfly by John Luther Long, Belasco's play based on the novel, and Puccini's opera based on the play. The court ruled that copyright protection in derivative works applies only to the new material added.
Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. vs. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 1955. This case decided that the character Sam Spade in the story The Maltese Falcon was a vehicle for the story, not a copyrightable element of the work.
Mazer vs. Stein, 1954. The court decided that copyright does not protect utilitarian or useful objects, in this case a sculptural lamp. It is possible to register the separable pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features of a utilitarian piece.
King vs. Mr. Maestro, Inc., 1963. This was a case about the speech "I have a dream" by Martin Luther King, Jr.. Although he had delivered the speech to a huge crowd with simultaneous broadcast by radio and television, the court decided that this public performance did not constitute publication and the speech could be registered for copyright as an unpublished work.
Letter Edged in Black Press, Inc., vs. Public Building Commission of Chicago, 1970. This case, about the public display of a Picasso sculpture, has been superseded by later legislation.
Williams Electronics, Inc. vs. Artic International, Inc., 1982. This case involved copying a video game. The court ruled that video game components were copyrightable and that computer read-only memory can be considered a copy.
Norris Industries, Inc. vs. International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., 1983.
The court ruled that, even if the Copyright Office rejects a work because it is not copyrightable, the owner is still entitled to file suit and to ask for a court ruling.
Privacy
Libraries, at least in the United States, feel strongly that users have a right to privacy.
Nobody should know that a user is consulting books on sensitive issues, such as unpleasant diseases. Libraries have gone to court, rather than divulge to the police whether a patron was reading books about communism. Many states have laws that prohibit libraries from gathering data that violates the privacy of their users. The Internet community has a similar tradition. Although corporations have the legal right to inspect the activities of their employees, most technical people expect their electronic mail and their computer files to be treated as private under most normal circumstances.
Problems arise because much of the technology of digital libraries is also used for electronic commerce. Advertisers and merchants strive to gather the maximum amount of information about their customers, often without the knowledge of the customer. They sell such information to each other. The web has the concept of
"cookies", which are useful for such purposes as recording when a user has been authenticated. Unfortunately, the same technology can also be used as a tool for tracking users' behavior without their knowledge.
As discussed in Panel 6.4, digital libraries must gather data on usage. Good data is needed to tune computer systems, anticipate problems, and plan for growth. With care, usage statistics can be gathered without identifying any specific individuals, but not everybody takes care. When a computer system fails, system administrators have the ability to look at any file on a server computer or inspect every message passing over a network. Occasionally they stumble across highly personal information or criminal activities. What is the correct behavior in these circumstance? What should the law say?