Copyright Misuse - Relevant Court Decisions

Relevant Court Decisions

Copyright misuse is not a statutory defense set forth in the federal Copyright Act but is instead founded in federal case law derived from the patent misuse doctrine. One of the earliest copyright misuse precedents is a case in the Minnesota Federal District Court, M. Witmark & Sons v. Jensen. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit subsequently endorsed the copyright misuse doctrine in Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds, Other appellate decisions in the area include Video Pipeline, Inc. v. Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata.

Improper behavior that may lead to a finding of copyright misuse includes (but is not limited to) anti-competitive activity. One notable exception is the court's decision in Princo Corporation vs. International Trade Commission. In that case, Princo Corporation had licensed patents from Philips to use data encoding technology, but eventually stopped paying for the patent. When Phillips sued, Princo argued that they should not be liable for their infringement because Phillips had made an agreement with Sony not to license a new patent that would allow for a different way of encoding data, which they claimed violated antitrust laws. The court disagreed, finding Pimco liable for infringement because the antitrust violation was seen as irrelevant to the original patent.

Restraints that hinder the promotion of the progress of human knowledge may be held copyright misuse, as in the Lasercomb case, which involved a restriction against development of improved computer code that might compete against the licensed code. Similar principles might condemn a restriction against exercise of fair use or against conduct protected under the First Amendment.