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Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. was a copyright lawsuit between two videotape production companies, filed in 1998. Fox lost in the U.S. Supreme Court with an 8-0 decision on 2 June 2003.
In 1948, Fox obtained the exclusive rights to create a television series called Crusade in Europe, based on the 1948 book written by Dwight D. Eisenhower and published by Doubleday. The 26-episode series showed World War II film footage from the US military and other sources, with a voice soundtrack based on a narration of the book. In 1975, Doubleday renewed the copyright on the book. Fox, however, did not renew the copyright on the TV series, so the show entered the public domain in 1977.
In 1988, Fox reacquired the television rights to the book, and licensed to other companies the right to distribute Crusade in Europe on video. Then in 1995, Dastar purchased betacam videotapes of the original TV series, copied the tapes, edited them to about half the original length, created new packaging, and sold the TV series as World War II Campaigns in Europe. The new videotapes and advertising mentioned Dastar and its employees as the producers, and did not mention the original Crusade in Europe book, TV series, or producers.
Fox sued in 1998, claiming that Dastar had infringed the copyright to the Crusade in Europe book, and that it had illegally done a "reverse passing off", passing off the work of others as its own work. The district court found for Fox and awarded it double the profits that Dastar had made. The Court of Appeals reversed the copyright claim and sent it back to the district court on remand, but upheld the "reverse passing off" ruling, and affirmed the award of double the profits.
The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling only on the "reverse passing off" claim, reversed the decisions of the appeals court and district court, ruling 8-0 in favor of Dastar. The Court reasoned that although the Lanham Act forbids a reverse passing off, this rule regarding the misuse of trademarks is trumped by the fact that once a copyrighted work (or, for that matter, a patented invention) passes into the public domain, anyone in the public may do anything they want with the work, with or without attribution to the author.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing in the decision, noted that the Court has said in the past that the Lanham Act "does not exist to reward manufacturers for their innovation in creating a particular device; that is the purpose of the patent law and its period of exclusivity," and that, therefore, claims about authorship cannot be used as an end-run around the underlying philosophy of a time limit on exclusive ownership of a copyright or patent. Allowing such restrictions on a public domain work would, Scalia wrote, "create a species of mutant copyright law that limits the public's 'federal right to "copy and to use"' expired copyrights," and would effectively create "a species of perpetual patent and copyright, which Congress may not do" according to Article One of the United States Constitution.
Scalia noted that if Dastar had instead purchased the post-1988 videotapes and copied them, this would have been a clear copyright infringement.
Analysis
This decision strengthened the rights of those who want to exploit works that have passed into the public domain. If this lawsuit had been decided the other way, claims based on trademark, or even based on moral rights such as attribution of authorship, could have been used to make it impractical for anyone to use works in the public domain, as intended by Article One of the United States Constitution.
Dastar could have avoided this legal attack entirely if they had credited the original authors. However, as Scalia noted in the opinion, this would have put them in a bind: Crediting the original authors might have implied their sponsorship or approval, which would exposed Dastar to other lawsuits.
Congress has repeatedly extended the term of U.S. copyrights, with legislation such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Because of this, no copyrighted works are currently passing into the public domain as long as they were still in copyright in 1998. The Dastar case will therefore have little impact on an ongoing basis, until Congress once again allows copyrights to start to expire.
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