Wayback Wednesday: Copyright lawsuits

In the copyright class that I teach (Copyright for Information Professionals), we have been discussing lawsuits that involved copyright.  While Google came to everyone's mind, we discussed Texaco and Legg Mason, too.

This blog has always contained posts about copyright, including a number on the Google Book Project. I've mentioned some of the other "famous" lawsuits in passing.  Allow me now to provide more information about those that seem to come to my mind whenever I think of copyright and the courts. The links below lead to a number of sites (noted in parentheses).

• Cambridge University Press et al v. Patton et al (Justia) - also known as the Georgia State case, which deals with course reserves.  (ongoing)
• Research Guide on Georgia State University Course Management System and E-Reserves Lawsuit (Rutgers)
• Georgia State Copyright Case: Resources (Educause)
• The Authors Guild, Inc. et al v. Hathitrust et al  - Litigation over the making, storing, and providing access to scans of digital books. (Hathitrust) (ongoing)
• The Authors Guild, Inc. et al v. Hathitrust et al (Justia) (ongoing)
• Google Books (Charles Bailey Jr.) (ongoing)
• Audio recordings on the Google Book Settlement (Copyright Clearance Center) - I have mentioned a number of these in individual blog posts over the years.  In addition, this post provides links to many of them and to several transcripts.
• Field v. Google, Inc. - "Google did not infringe on Field's copyright by indexing and caching his online story. Website owners can use meta tags or robots.txt files to keep a search engine from indexing a particular page. Also Google's use of the materials in their database was fair use."  (from the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use site) (2006)
• Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc. - "Google's creation and public display of 'thumbnails' likely do directly infringe P10's copyrights as part of a preliminary injunction decision." (from the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use site)  (2006)
• Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. "Rural's white pages are not entitled to copyright, and therefore Feist's use of them does not constitute infringement."  (Justia) (1991)
• American Geophysical Union v. Texaco - "A corporate researcher who made copies of journal articles for his files could be infringing copyright, and should license the articles instead." (from the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use site)  (1995)
• Tasini v. New York Times (Justia) - dealt with the rights of freelance authors. (2001)
  
• Tasini v. New York Times: With the Freelance Settlement Rejected, What's Next? (from Digitization 101) (2011)
• Lowry's Reports v. Legg Mason (Outsell) - Litigation over systematic illegal photocopying within an organization. The two sides reached an undisclosed settlement after the verdict. (2004)

This list contains those that I find myself mentioning and it is not exhaustive. (more here) 

As I told my students, as a corporate librarian, the Texaco case got me more interested in copyright.  That case affected what I did (and didn't do).  It had a definite impact and would have had a bigger impact if it had gone to the Supreme Court.  I also point to that case as an example of how long a court case can take until it is truly finished.  That one lasted 10 years.

What copyright litigation has caught your eye and made you delve deeper into the law?  Leave a comment and tell me.  I and my students would be interested to know!