Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Publishing Group, Inc.

United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit · 1998 · Property

PropertyCopyrightFair UseDerivative Workscopyright infringementfair usesubstantial similaritytransformative use

Facts

Castle Rock owned the copyrights in each episode of the Seinfeld television series. Defendants authored and published The Seinfeld Aptitude Test, a 132-page trivia book containing 643 questions and answers drawn from 84 of the 86 aired Seinfeld episodes, with every question and correct answer based on fictional moments from the show and 41 questions or answers containing Seinfeld dialogue. Golub created the book by taking notes from broadcasts and reviewing recorded episodes, and the book prominently used the name "Seinfeld" and images of principal actors. Castle Rock had licensed some Seinfeld-related products but had not authorized this trivia book.

Issue

Whether The Seinfeld Aptitude Test copied enough protected expression from Seinfeld to constitute actionable copyright infringement, and if so, whether the book's use of Seinfeld was nevertheless protected as fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107.

Rule

Once actual copying is established, infringement requires substantial similarity to protected expression, meaning copying that is quantitatively more than de minimis and qualitatively directed at copyrightable expression rather than unprotectable ideas or facts. In fair use analysis, courts weigh the statutory factors in light of copyright's purposes, with special attention to whether the secondary work is transformative and whether it usurps a traditional or likely derivative market that the copyright owner would generally develop or license.

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One of 10 multiple-choice questions for this case. Pick an answer to see why.

In Chicago, Rowan Pike publishes a 160-page fan quiz book devoted entirely to the fictional detective series Harbor Nights, produced by North Loop Studio. The book contains 700 questions drawn from 90 episodes of the show, with each question keyed to an invented scene, joke, or character incident from the series.

If North Loop Studio sues for copyright infringement and Rowan admits copying from the episodes, which is the strongest argument that the copying is quantitatively more than de minimis?

Explanation. The majority held that for a discrete, continuous television series, quantitative copying may be assessed in the aggregate rather than episode by episode. Hundreds of fragments drawn across the series crossed the de minimis threshold. The court also rejected the idea that infringement requires the original to be recreatable from the copy, and it did not treat cross-medium copying as automatically sufficient.