Advanced Copyright Issues on the Internet - Fenwick & West LLP

plaintiffs also alleged that the defendants had violated Sections 1202(a) and (b) by falselynaming themselves as the copyright holders of the pictures published in 1000 Patterns and by“removing” the plaintiffs’ copyright notices from those pictures. 966The court found no violation of the CMI provisions of the DMCA. The court noted thatto recover for a violation of Section 1202(a), a plaintiff must prove that the defendant knew theCMI on a distributed work was false and distributed the false CMI with the intent to aidinfringement. The court ruled that the plaintiffs had not shown that the defendants possessed therequisite knowledge or intent to violate the relevant copyrights. Although there was evidence attrial that the defendants instructed its employees to avoid using too many series of page imagesfrom any single book containing the plaintiffs’ photographs, the court found the evidenceindicated only that the defendants knew the plaintiffs had copyrights in their books ascompilations, not that they knew the individual photographs contained therein were copyrightprotected. Other evidence at trial suggested that the defendants erroneously believed theplaintiffs had no copyright in their individual photographs because they contained insufficientcreativity. Accordingly, the intent requirement of Section 1202(a) was not met. 967The court also found no violation of Section 1201(b) because the only CMI the plaintiffsincluded with their work were notices of copyright that appeared on the inside covers of theirbooks. The individual photographs that were the subject of the action did not contain any CMIwhatsoever, either on or near the images themselves. The court ruled that to establish a violationof Section 1202(b), the defendants must remove CMI from the body of, or area around, theplaintiffs’ work. Because the plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate the defendants had done so, theclaim for violation of Section 1202(b) failed. 968(v)Monotype Imaging, Inc. v. Bitstream Inc.In Monotype Imaging, Inc. v. Bitstream Inc., 969 the court adopted a rather broad readingof the scope of the CMI provisions. The plaintiff Monotype developed and distributed fonts andfont software. The defendant Bitstream competed with Monotype, and developed a productcalled TrueDoc, a computer program that facilitated the display of typeface designs on computerscreens and other output devices. Bitstream openly promoted the fact that TrueDoc replicatedthe original typefaces of other vendors. TrueDoc included a Character Shape Recorder (CSR)component that created a compact file format called a Portable Font Resource (PFR) based on anunderlying font software program. The CSR obtained data that described the shape of thetypeface characters of the underlying font program from the computer’s operating system. Whenaccessing information from the operating system about the font software, TrueDoc did notrequest the copyright notice from the Windows operating system. 970 Monotype brought a claimfor copyright infringement, apparently based on alleged copying of Monotype’s font software in966967968969970Id. at 1101.Id. at 1102.Id.2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7410 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 21, 2005).Id. at *2-3.- 215 -