It emphatically did not hold that noninfringing end products based on that infringement could be enjoined even after trial, much less on a motion for preliminary injunction. There is simply no legal support for enjoining noninfringing works. Granting an injunction that extends to noninfringing works would have troubling consequences. As an initial matter, the district court's reasoning would seem quite hard to contain. Many copyrighted works are used in producing other works.
Historians rely on the works of prior historians in writing their own books.
Scientists rely on journal articles in designing their own experiments, and engineers in building products. This brief was written with a copyrighted Microsoft word processor. Each of these activities has heretofore been legal for the simple reason that the works these actors have produced do not contain any copyrighted material, and so they are not infringing. But the district court's injunction casts that fundamental assumption into doubt. Under the district court's approach, if an automotive engineer photocopies a scientific journal article for her research rather th an buying it, that engineer may risk not only liability for the unlawful copying, but an injunction against building or selling a car.