Addressing a copyright infringement claim in which 20 years passed between the date of first publication and the date of registration, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the lower court’s dismissal of the claim, finding that the claimant’s copyright registration did not benefit from prima facie validity and that the claimant therefore failed to meet its burden of establishing a valid copyright. Brown v. Latin American Music Co., Case No. 06-2710 (1st Cir., Aug. 7, 2007) (Newman, J., sitting by designation).
The plaintiff Roy Brown brought an action for a declaratory judgment that a poem written by Juan Antonio Corretjer was in the public domain. The defendants, referred to collectively as LAMCO, filed a counterclaim alleging that Brown infringed LAMCO’s 2000 copyright on an additional 10 poems written by Corretjer, based on LAMCO’s 2000 copyright registration for a work that included the 11 poems at issue. Brown, however, produced evidence that 10 of the poems appeared in books or pamphlets with publication dates from 1952 to 1976. None of these works contained a copyright notice. Both the 1909 Copyright Act and the 1976 Copyright Act required a copyright notice in the first publication for a valid copyright, placing the burden on LAMCO to show that the poems at issue were not published before the 1979 publication date cited in LAMCO’s 2000 registration certificate. LAMCO only entered general denials to Brown’s evidence, forcing the district court to consider what evidentiary weight was appropriate to give to LAMCO’s copyright certificate. The district court denied Brown’s motion for summary judgment but dismissed LAMCO’s infringement counterclaim, finding that LAMCO’s copyright did not benefit from prima facie validity and that it had therefore not established the elements necessary to proceed in a copyright infringement suit.
On appeal, the First Circuit began by stating that it need not consider whether it had appellate jurisdiction to grant Brown’s motion for summary judgment, as it was affirming the lower court’s dismissal of the infringement counterclaim. Based on the five-year rule of 17 USC §410(c), the First Circuit stated that a registration obtained after five years of first publication is not entitled to a presumption of validity. The First Court also stated that the weight to be given to such a registration is within the discretion of the court. The First Circuit then affirmed the lower court’s finding that LAMCO’s copyright did not benefit from prima facie validity. The court cited the lower court’s findings of fact questioning the validity of the certificate’s facts, such as LAMCO’s concession that five of the poems were published in 1957, despite the certificate’s statement that the first publication was in 1979, and LAMCO’s failure to counter Brown’s submissions concerning the publication of the poems without a copyright notice. Finding no substantive support for LAMCO’s claim of copyright, the First Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the infringement claim.
Practice Note: This case sets forth a "standing" rule for copyright claimants: a long hiatus between publication and registration creates a presumption that the work entered the public domain and removes the usual presumption of validity for the registration, placing the burden on the copyright claimant to establish ownership of a valid copyright.
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