Advanced Copyright Law on the Internet

In this case, the defendant gathered news stories on the Internet, including those of the
Associated Press, and prepared them for republication by its customer sites under its own banner,
either rewriting the text or copying the stories in full. It instructed its reporters to remove or alter
the identification of the AP as author or copyright holder of the articles. AP brought a claim for
common law “hot news” misappropriation and for violation of Section 1202. The defendant
brought a motion to dismiss the claims, which the court denied. With respect to the CMI claim,
the court rejected the IQ Group court’s definition of CMI as limited to copyright management
performed by the technological measures of automated systems. The court found that definition
to be inconsistent with the text of the statutory definition, which makes no reference to “the
technological measures of automated systems.” Accordingly, the court denied the motion to
dismiss the CMI claim.^1315

c. Fox v. Hildebrand

In this case, the court rejected the Ya Ya Brand and IQ Group cases, ruling that CMI is
not limited to notices that are digitally placed on a copyrighted work. The court found that the
reference to “including in digital form” in the statutory definition of CMI in Section 1202(c)
indicated that the definition was not limited to notices in digital form. Accordingly, the
plaintiff’s allegation that the defendant had copied the plaintiff’s architectural drawings, on
which the plaintiff had handwritten a copyright notice, and erroneously designated itself as the
copyright owner on the copied drawings, stated a claim under Section 1202(b) of the DMCA
sufficient to survive the defendant’s motion to dismiss.^1316

d. Faulkner Press v. Class Notes

In this case, the court ruled that the plain language of the DMCA does not limit the
definition of CMI to notices that are placed on works through technological processes. However,
it granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant with respect to the plaintiff’s claims for
removal of CMI and addition of false CMI. The plaintiff owned the copyrights in electronic
textbooks and film study questions created by a professor at the University of Florida for two
wildlife issues courses. The textbooks had CMI printed on the boxes containing the electronic
textbooks and within the textbooks’ software. The film study questions were alleged to contain
CMI by virtue of a watermark that appeared on the questions when viewed at a website
maintained for the professor’s course.^1317

Class Notes hired students to take notes on the professor’s class, and the plaintiff alleged
that in the course of the note taking, the students viewed copyrighted material taken from the
textbooks and film study questions presented by the professor and copied such material into the
Class Notes note package. The plaintiff asserted a removal of CMI claim based on the fact that
the Class Notes note package did not reproduce the CMI printed on the boxes of the electronic

(^1315) Associated Press v. All Headline News Corp., 608 F. Supp. 2d 454, 457 & 461-62 (S.D.N.Y. 2009).
(^1316) Fox v. Hildebrand, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60886 at 2, 5-8 (C.D. Cal. July 1, 2009).
(^1317) Faulkner Press, LLC v. Class Notes, LLC, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 123935 at 2, 5 &13-14 (N.D. Fla. Nov. 23,
2010).