A Connecticut federal court held that LEGO could not establish fair use as a matter of law for copying an artist’s painted jacket onto a Queer Eye minifigure, while dismissing the artist’s trade-dress claim for lack of likely confusion.
The D.C. Circuit upheld the DMCA exemption permitting access to medical-device software for diagnosis, maintenance, and repair as a reasoned application of copyright fair use.
A Massachusetts federal court held that an imperfect but genuine fair-use review defeated a Section 512(f) claim over DMCA notices targeting clips of local-government meetings.
A federal court let a DMCA subpoena proceed against an anonymous archive operator but deferred disclosure while considering a protective order.
A Central District of California court granted summary judgment for a fashion blogger who used a train photo found on Google Images, finding all four fair use factors weighed in her favor and rejecting the plaintiff’s CMI (§ 1202) claim as well.
A federal judge in the Central District of California granted judgment on the pleadings to a Twitch streamer who livestreamed a nearly four-hour critical reaction to a YouTube documentary, holding that her real-time commentary, criticism, and mockery constituted fair use as a matter of law.
A federal court in Pennsylvania granted summary judgment to a photographer whose copyrighted image was republished without permission on a commercial dog breeder’s blog, rejecting the defendant’s fair use defense on all four statutory factors.
In a remarkable reversal of its own prior reversal, the Tenth Circuit unanimously held that Netflix’s use of a 66-second funeral clip in the Tiger King docuseries was fair use, finding all four statutory factors favor the defendants.
The Second Circuit revived a videographer’s copyright claims against a hip-hop news website that republished his 42-second video of Michael Jordan breaking up a fight, ruling that fair use and de minimis defenses were wrongly decided at the pleading stage.
The CJEU Grand Chamber ruled that pastiche under Article 5(3)(k) of the InfoSoc Directive requires an objectively recognizable artistic dialogue with the source work, expressly excluding concealed imitations and plagiarism.
The Third Circuit affirmed denial of a preliminary injunction, holding that UpCodes’ verbatim republication of copyrighted ASTM building standards incorporated into law likely constitutes fair use because its purpose — providing free public access to the law — is transformative.
The Third Circuit affirmed the denial of ASTM’s preliminary injunction, holding that UpCodes’ free online publication of copyrighted technical standards that have been incorporated by reference into building codes likely constitutes fair use — even though UpCodes is a for-profit company that reproduced the standards in full.
Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that Meta’s use of copyrighted books to train its Llama large language model constitutes fair use, finding the purpose highly transformative and rejecting plaintiffs’ market-harm theory—though he flagged a “market dilution” theory that, if properly argued, might have succeeded.
The Supreme Court held 7-2 that the Andy Warhol Foundation’s commercial licensing of Warhol’s silkscreen portrait of Prince — based on a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith — was not fair use, because the commercial licensing purpose closely tracked the photographer’s own licensing market and the transformation was insufficient to override the significant commercial harm.
The Supreme Court held 6-2 that Google’s copying of approximately 11,500 lines of Java API declaring code to build the Android mobile operating system was fair use — holding that the declaring code’s function as an interoperability interface, combined with Google’s transformative use in a new computing environment, justified the copying.
The Ninth Circuit held that Google’s display of thumbnail-size images in search results is fair use, while also addressing the server test for direct infringement — holding that a website that inline-links to content stored on another server does not ‘display’ that content and thus does not directly infringe the reproduction right.