Copyright Law

Federal Court Doesn?t Quite Recognize Copyright in C&D Letter

By Joe Gratz

Techdirt has a post on a rather triumphal press release put out by a law firm claiming that “[t]he US District Court for the District of Idaho has found that copyright law protects a lawyer demand letter posted online by the recipient.” That’s one way of interpreting the judge’s ruling, but I don’t think it’s the right way.

Here’s what happened. An anonymous poster (“Tom Paine”) said some things on a message board that a company called Melaleuca didn’t like. Melaleuca’s lawyers sent a letter to the message board’s administrators asking them to take down the posts to which they objected. Then, a second anonymous poster (“d2″) posted Melaleuca’s cease-and-desist letter to the message board.

Melaleuca wanted to know Tom Paine’s identity so that they could take some action against him. But bringing a John Doe lawsuit would be expensive and time-consuming. Then Melaleuca had a clever idea: because section 512 of the Copyright Act allows pre-litigation subpoenas to uncover the identities of anonymous online copyright infringers, they could get Tom Paine’s identity by (1) accusing d2 of infringing the copyright in their cease and desist letter, then (2) claiming that d2 and Tom Paine were the same person.

Well, it almost, sort of worked.

They were successful in getting d2’s identity, because the court found the test for issuance of a section 512 subpoena to be a lenient one: If the Copyright Office issues a registration, the court found, that’s all the copyrightability analysis a court must undertake in order to enforce a pre-litigation subpoena under section 512. The court did not say that the C&D letter was copyrightable, or that posting it was not fair use. Instead, the court merely said that Melaleuca had met the low bar of showing a prima facie case of infringement. As the court put it:

[T]he Court will not go into an in-depth analysis of the merits of a copyright infringement claim in determining whether to quash this subpoena. It is sufficient in this instance that Melaleuca has registered the Sheppard Letter with the Copyright Office.

Unlike the Patent and Trademark Office, the Copyright Office (for various very good reasons) does not perform an in-depth examination of each registration. As the lawyer who put out the press release notes, “a US copyright registration is usually ‘rubber stamped’ and obtained on an expedited basis in about five business days.” Close cases, such as an attempt to register a virtually purely functional work such as a legal demand letter, usually result in the issuance of a registration, the validity of which is later contested in court. The district court in this case decided that the validity of the copyright should be determined after the plaintiffs actually filed their lawsuit for copyright infringement. It did not, as the press release implies, make a conclusive determination of copyrightability.

Melaleuca was thwarted in its ultimate goal of unmasking “Tom Paine.” The court found that Melaleuca had presented insufficient evidence that “d2″ and “Tom Paine” were one and the same, and quashed that portion of the subpoena which sought Tom Paine’s identity. (The edited version of the decision on the web site of the lawyer who put out the press release conveniently leaves that part out, but it makes up a substantial part of the court’s decision, which is available here.)

Full post as published by Joe Gratz on January 26, 2008 (boomark / email).