''Callaghan v. Myers'', 128 U.S. 617 (1888), was a
United States Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...
ruling dealing with
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...
.
Background
The firm of Eugene B. Myers & Chandler, composed of Myers and Horace P. Chandler, purchased the copyright of the arrangement of a number of
Illinois Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of Illinois is the state supreme court, the highest court of the judiciary of Illinois. The court's authority is granted in Article VI of the current Illinois Constitution, which provides for seven justices elected from the fiv ...
records compiled by Norman L. Freeman. It printed those works as the ''
Illinois Reports'' Volumes 32 to 38 from 1865 to 1867. Myers alone held the copyright to Freeman's arrangements of Volumes 39 to 46 and printed them as well.
The conflict began when Myers made some changes to the arrangement of Volumes 37 and 38 and published them by observing the procedure to procure copyright on these alternative works. The defendants, Callaghan & Company, offered to purchase licenses to publish the new versions of Volumes 37 and 38 but would not pay Myers's price. Instead, they made very minor changes to Myers's version, copied essentially verbatim the portions of the book that were actually copyrightable, and published it as their own work. Myers sued them for
copyright infringement
Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of Copyright#Scope, works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the c ...
, and the case eventually went to the Supreme Court.
Decision
The Court upheld earlier
case law
Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is a law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of ...
, such as ''
Banks v. Manchester'', which state that court documents belonged to the
public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...
. In regards to the case at hand, it ruled that the elements of the books that organized or summarized those judicial works constitute intellectual effort. Therefore, Myers held the copyright because he followed the copyrighting procedures in all cases except one. The Court found that the copies of Volume 32 that were required for formally copyrighting the work had arrived late and so that volume was not copyrighted. Nonetheless, the plaintiff, Myers, was entitled to compensation in full for the infringement damages if he chose to collect them.
[.]
References
External links
*
1888 in United States case law
United States Supreme Court cases
United States copyright case law
United States Supreme Court cases of the Fuller Court
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