From Campbell v. Acuff-Rose to Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, explore curated case dossiers complete with procedural postures, core holdings, judicial reasoning, and downstream precedential influence.
510 U.S. 569 (1994)
A commercial parody may qualify as fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107. The commercial nature of a secondary use does not create an automatic presumption against fair use; rather, the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of commercialism under Factor 1.
598 U.S. 504 (2023)
The Andy Warhol Foundation's commercial licensing of 'Orange Prince' to Condé Nast does not qualify as fair use under Factor 1. When an original work and a secondary use share substantially the same commercial purpose, Factor 1 weighs against fair use unless there is an independent transformative justification.
593 U.S. 1 (2021)
Google's copying of the Java API declaring code was fair use as a matter of law. Reimplementation of declaring code to enable programmer skill portability in a novel computing environment satisfies the transformative purposes of copyright.
804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015)
Google's mass scanning of books to create a full-text searchable database and display snippets is transformative fair use. Non-expressive computational indexing provides enormous public benefit without creating a market substitute.
573 U.S. 208 (2014)
The claims are patent-ineligible because they target an abstract idea (intermediated settlement) and fail to provide an 'inventive concept' that transforms the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application.
514 U.S. 159 (1995)
A single color can be registered as a trademark under the Lanham Act if it has acquired secondary meaning identifying product source and does not serve a functional purpose.
No. 18-CIV-05135 (Cal. Super. Ct. 2020)
The $52 million settlement established an industry benchmark for content moderation occupational safety, requiring platforms to fund psychiatric diagnosis/treatment and mandate software mitigations (grayscale display, audio muting, 4-hour daily exposure limits).
No. 23-cv-00770 (N.D. Cal. 2024)
Workday can be held directly liable as an 'employment agency' and 'agent' under federal anti-discrimination laws because its AI software exercises delegated decision-making authority over job applicants.
569 U.S. 576 (2013)
A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated. However, complementary DNA (cDNA) is patent eligible because it is synthetic and does not occur naturally in the human genome.
903 F.3d 1286 (Fed. Cir. 2018)
Substantial evidence supported the PTAB's determination of no interference-in-fact. Eukaryotic application of CRISPR-Cas9 was a non-obvious inventive leap requiring separate patent claims from generic prokaryotic gene editing.
No. 1:24-cv-00710 (M.D.N.C. 2024)
The DOJ complaint establishes the modern enforcement theory of algorithmic horizontal price fixing: sharing data through a centralized algorithmic hub substitutes collective algorithmic pricing for independent market competition.
DA 23-888 (FCC 2023)
The FCC issued its first-ever space debris enforcement penalty, finding DISH failed to properly deorbit EchoStar-7, imposing a $150,000 civil penalty, and establishing precedent for orbital debris regulatory enforcement.
188 U.S. 239 (1903)
Commercial advertisements are fully eligible for copyright protection. Justice Holmes established the foundational 'Aesthetic Non-Discrimination Principle': judges trained only in law must not constitute themselves final arbiters of the artistic merit or worth of pictorial illustrations.
111 U.S. 53 (1884)
Photographs are copyrightable works of authorship when the human creator exercises mental conception, poses the subject, arranges lighting, and selects the visual composition.
464 U.S. 417 (1984)
The sale of copying equipment does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes or is capable of substantial non-infringing uses. Private non-commercial home time-shifting of free television broadcasts is fair use.
499 U.S. 340 (1991)
The Supreme Court unanimously held that alphabetical white pages directories lack the requisite creative originality for copyright. Originality is a constitutional requirement requiring independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. The Court explicitly repudiated the 'sweat of the brow' doctrine.
849 F.2d 460 (9th Cir. 1988)
When a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort under California common law.
401 U.S. 424 (1971)
Title VII prohibits not only intentional discrimination, but also employment practices that are facially neutral in their treatment of different groups but that in fact fall more harshly on one group than another and cannot be justified by business necessity. Chief Justice Burger established the landmark 'Disparate Impact Doctrine'.
447 U.S. 303 (1980)
A live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Congress intended patentable subject matter to 'include anything under the sun that is made by man.'
509 U.S. 579 (1993)
The Frye 'general acceptance' test was superseded by the Federal Rules of Evidence. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, the trial judge must ensure that all scientific and technological testimony is not only relevant, but reliable, acting as a judicial 'gatekeeper'.
881 N.W.2d 749 (Wis. 2016)
The use of an algorithmic risk assessment at sentencing does not violate due process, provided that the risk score is not used to determine whether to incarcerate or the severity of the sentence, and is accompanied by mandatory judicial warnings regarding the tool's proprietary nature, racial disparities, and group-level statistical limitations.
663 F. Supp. 3d 318 (S.D.N.Y. 2023)
The Rogers v. Grimaldi artistic relevance test applies to NFT digital art, but does not protect digital creators who use another's famous trademark to intentionally mislead consumers as to source or affiliation in digital marketplaces. The jury found Rothschild liable on all counts, awarding Hermès $133,000 in damages.