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High Court Hands Fox Copyright Defeat

By Tony Mauro
August 23, 2003

[Editor's note: The following article on the Supreme Court's decision in Dastar Corp. v. 20th Century Fox Film Corp. doesn't center on e-commerce. But E-commerce Law & Strategy is offering the synopsis of the decision in the story below for readers who represent Web sites and other e-commerce enterprises that use public-domain material as content to drive sales, use it to market their products and/or Web sites or even sell public-domain material. The High Court's ruling allows use of unattributed public-domain material, lifting concerns that such unattributed use is actionable under the Lanham Act, which some authors and other artists have relied on to seek relief for repeated use of unattributed material, even though such material had entered the public domain.]

In a major narrowing of the Lanham Act, the U.S. Supreme Court on June 2 ruled unanimously that the law allows the copying of public domain material without giving credit to its source.

The 8-0 ruling in Dastar Corp. v. 20th Century Fox Film Corp. (No. 02-428) removes the cloud of Lanham Act liability from companies, libraries, Web sites and databases that repackage facts or information that originated elsewhere.

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