16 April 2021
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The recent ruling in Google v. Oracle has altered the definition of “fair use” when it comes to functional works such as code. While the use of existing creative works must still be transformative in order to avoid violating copyright laws, it will now be much easier to claim fair use when building on existing functional creations. JMBM’s Entertainment Litigation Chair Jeff Goldman explains the case below and discusses its potential impact on the hotel industry.
How does the Supreme Court’s Google v. Oracle case
impact the hotel industry (beyond software)?
by
Jeff Goldman, Chair, JMBM’s Entertainment Litigation Group
It was hyped as the “copyright case of the century.” Justice Clarence Thomas, in his dissent, frets that the majority “transforms the definition of ‘transformative’” use into nothing more than “a use that will help others ‘create new products’” — a “new definition” that “eviscerates copyright.” Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., dissent at 16-17. As an example of what might now be considered a “fair use,” Justice Thomas cites a “movie studio that converts a book into a film without permission[.]” Id. at 17.
Justice Thomas’s concern may be an overstatement. Whatever the repercussions of Google v. Oracle for the software industry, read in context, any attempt to apply its fair use analysis to works that are more creative than functional — like movies, books, and music — ought to fall flat. Nevertheless, various types of copyrighted works important to hotel operators may well be affected by the Court’s fair use analysis.
Copyright law basics
First, briefly, some background. Copyright law protects original “expression” that is fixed in some tangible medium (e.g., paper, film) but not “the ‘ideas’ that lay behind” that expression. Google at 13. The difference between an “idea,” and the “expression” of that idea, is often a difficult line to draw. One concept used to distinguish between idea and expression is that works, or parts of them, that are largely functional or utilitarian are closer to mere “ideas” than to protectable “expression.” Works — including computer code — that are purely functional or utilitarian are considered noncopyrightable ideas, rather than copyrightable expression. See RJ Control Consultants, Inc. v. Multiject, LLC, 981 F.3d 446, 457-58 (6th Cir. 2020). On the other hand, the threshold for copyrighrability is low; to be copyrightable, a work need only “possess some creative spark, ‘no matter how crude, humble or obvious’ it might be.” Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340, 345 (1991) (quoting Professor Nimmer).
A copyright owner’s exclusive power over a copyrighted work is also subject to various limitations, including that “a copyright holder cannot prevent another person from making a ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material.” Google at 13, citing 17 U.S.C. § 107. Among the factors courts consider in the fair use analysis is how much the new work “transforms” the original work — a concept that courts have had trouble applying with any degree of consistency and predictability.
The Google case
The Google case centered on the protectability, and Google’s use, of a type of largely functional computer code called “declaring code.” The easy way for the Supreme Court to decide the case would have been to simply rule that Oracle’s “declaring code” was not copyrightable — as Google argued, and the district judge agreed (a ruling the Federal Circuit reversed). But it was clear from oral argument that the Court was having none of that. CONTINUE READING →
