Last week, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma issued an opinion in Advanta-Star Auto. Research Corp. of Am. v. Reynolds Ford Inc., No. 5-19-cv-00912 (September 30, 2020), addressing whether a copyright designation in a generic website footer qualified as copyright management information (CMI).
Advanta-Star, an automotive research company that provides automotive information, filed suit against Reynolds for its use of content from the Advanta Star website and its removal of CMI. Advanta-Star owns multiple copyright registrations related to “detailed reviews and other information regarding automobiles and their features.” Advanta-Star claims Reynolds violated 17 U.S.C. § 1202(a) and (b) by replacing Advanta-Star’s CMI with its own before publishing the allegedly infringing content on its website. Specifically, Reynolds placed the copyright designation “Copyright © 2019 FordDirect. All Rights Reserved.” at the bottom of its web pages that displayed the allegedly infringing content.
Reynolds moved to dismiss Advanta-Star’s claims for falsification of CMI on the grounds that its copyright designation did not qualify as CMI under the statutory definition of the term. In particular, Reynolds argued that its copyright designation is not “conveyed in connection with” the website content because it is located in a “generic website footer” rather than “near or next to” the allegedly infringing content. The District Court disagreed and held Advanta-Star adequately pled its claim for distribution of false CMI under 17 U.S.C. § 1202(a). The Court considered the relative degrees of removal between the footer and the copyrighted work, focusing on the fact that the content at issue was the web page itself, and the CMI in the footer of the website was conveyed in connection with the copy of the work.
Reynolds also moved to dismiss Advanta-Star’s claim that Reynolds removed CMI. Reynolds argued Advanta-Star’s claim failed because Advanta-Star did not adequately identify the copyrighted works. The Court rejected Reynolds’s argument, holding Advanta-Star’s Complaint described the copyrighted materials, provided the numbers of the copyright registrations at issue, and attached copies of the Reynolds webpages that allegedly infringed those works. Further, the Court found that the Complaint contained multiple allegations of CMI removal, including a claim that “the copyright notices and all reference to Plaintiff . . . had been removed,” and that these allegations were sufficient to state a plausible claim for relief under 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b).