Advanced Copyright Law on the Internet

(iv) Stockart.com v. Engle

The plaintiff Stockart was in the business of licensing downloads of high end digital
imagery through the Internet. Although the images were generally created by others, Stockart
took title to the copyrights in the works and paid per-download fees to the creators. The
defendant performed unauthorized downloads of several of Stockart’s images and used them to
create logos, which the defendant posted and sold on his own website. All images on
Stockart.com contained a copyright notice and a © symbol at the bottom of the website screen on
which each image appeared. On a motion for a default judgment, a magistrate judge found that
such notice and symbol constituted protectable CMI, that by incorporating Stockart’s images into
his logos, the defendant had removed Stockart’s CMI from the images, that such removal had
been intentional, and that the defendant knew that the removal was a violation of the Copyright
Act because, in order to establish an account with Stockart, the defendant had been required to
acknowledge and accept a copyright warning in order to search and download images on the site,
which warning stated that removal of images from the site or their separation from the copyright
management information on the site was not authorized and constituted a violation of copyright
law.^1433

Accordingly, the magistrate recommended that the district court conclude that Stockart
had stated a viable claim for removal of CMI. Citing the Stockwire case, the magistrate noted
that each time a defendant unlawfully posts an unauthorized work for distribution on the Internet,
a single violation of the CMI provisions occurs for which a statutory damage award may be
made. Here, the magistrate found that the defendant had extracted Stockart images into his logos
and posted them on websites for sale a total of 34 times, resulting in 34 violations. The
magistrate recommended that the district court award statutory damages of $10,000 per violation,
for a total award of $340,000.^1434

(v) Granger v. One Call Lender Services

In this case, the plaintiff was the owner of a computer program that estimated the rate or
cost of real estate title insurance sold by title insurance agents. The defendants placed an
infringing version of the rate calculator program on their website, though later took it down upon
receipt of a demand letter from the plaintiff. The plaintiff had placed external copyright notices
(“Copyright 1997-2002 by John Granger” and “All Rights Reserved”) and the name of One Call
Lender Services, LLC as web developer and author on the computer program, and had embedded
within the computer program similar copyright tag lines and a watermark that, if not removed
carefully, could leave a tell-tale sign as to the origin of the work. In posting the program onto

(^1433) Stockart.com, LLC v. Engle, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20470 at 3-6, 28-29 (D. Colo. Feb. 18, 2011).
(^1434) Id. at 39-41. The magistrate also recommended a finding of willful infringement and an award of statutory
damages under Section 504(b) for copyright infringement in the amount of $30,000 per infringed work. The
magistrate based this recommendation on testimony that Stockart normally asked small businesses for a license
fee of $10,000 for use of an image in a logo, and the majority of courts awarding statutory damages for willful
infringement utilize a benchmark of two to three times the license fee for computing the award. Id. at *38.