Source: https://www.mediainstitute.org/2015/02/04/kienitz-v-sconnie-nation-llc-part-ii/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 06:10:00+00:00

Document:
I think the Cheshire Cat analysis is flawed conceptually and legally, for reasons I discuss below – but I also find it flawed visually. Compare the two images above. The image on the t-shirt contains virtually all the protected elements of the original photograph. It is nothing like the story of the Cheshire Cat, in which the body disappeared and only the smile remained. But more on that later.
Kienitz has filed a petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier this week The Media Institute issued a press release announcing that it had filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to grant the petition. I was counsel of record for The Media Institute on the brief. The deeper reflection on the case prompted by work on the brief prompted the thoughts below, which summarize the arguments advanced in the brief.
The Seventh Circuit’s approach effectively eviscerates the fundamental distinction between parody and satire, a distinction central to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.3 In parody, some use of an underlying work is unavoidable, because the parodist must mimic in order to make the parody’s comedic or critical point. With satire, however, exploitation of the underlying work is easily avoidable. The nascent expansion of the fair use doctrine in Kienitz effectively places parody and satire on the same plane. This wrongly grants to satirists a free license to exploit underlying works, even in the absence of any nexus between the message communicated by the satirist and critique of the substance or style of the underlying work.
To lift a photograph and use it to produce a t-shirt is a quintessential example of a derivative work.6 If a derivative work, as defined by Congress, includes “any form” by which a work may be “recast, transformed, or adapted,” it is simply incoherent to treat any work that is “transformative” as protected “fair use.” This would equate “fair use” with “derivative work” and flip the law on its head. The most rational way to reconcile the notion of transformation in fair use doctrine with the notion of transformation in derivative works is to draw the line exactly as Campbell suggested it be drawn. When the prior work is taken and new material is added to transform it in a manner that does not critique or comment upon the underlying work, it is the sort of transformation that characterizes a derivative work and may not be done without a license from the copyright holder. On the other hand, when the transformation falls within a unique subset of transformations in which the underlying work is in some manner being critiqued or commented upon, it may qualify as the sort of transformation that counts positively toward a finding of fair use.
The Seventh Circuit’s Cheshire Cat analysis, while impishly literate, was conceptually flawed. The body of the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was able to mystically disappear, leaving only its lingering grin. Alice reflected that she had “often seen a cat without a grin,” but never “a grin without a cat!” Kienitz’s photograph of Soglin, however, did not disappear when transferred to the t-shirt. It was copied verbatim, transferred, and altered, processes quite different from those imagined by Lewis Carroll, whether considered through the looking glasses of literature, logic, or law.
There are rare cases in which a photograph or video captures the only extant images of a highly newsworthy public event, so that secondary use of the photograph might be deemed a fair use because it is impossible otherwise to analyze the underlying event.9 Under the “merger doctrine,” copyright protection may be denied when the idea underlying the copyrighted work can be expressed in only one way.10 In the Kienitz photo, however, as in the vast run of cases, the photograph and the underlying reality are not merged, and the photograph stands on its own as the exclusive property of the photographer. The Seventh Circuit’s analysis threatens to render photography a free-fire zone for free-riders.
Finally, the Seventh Circuit’s expansion of fair use conflated the remedy that may be appropriate in infringement actions arising from the exploitation of photographs with the predicate issue of liability. It may well be that in some cases the economic harm caused by any one isolated piracy of a copyrighted photograph is negligible. The Copyright Act’s answer, however, is to tailor the remedy, not to destroy the underlying right. Fair use is a blunt all-or-nothing instrument; when successfully invoked it entirely destroys the copyright holder’s rights. The remedial provisions of the Copyright Act, in contrast, contain refined and precise instruments, allowing a court to preserve the right while circumscribing the remedy. Infringements of intellectual property, like trespasses on real property, often involve only nominal economic damage. Yet the law has always empowered courts to enforce a property owner’s right to redress for infringement or trespass, even when economic harm is nominal, by empowering courts to adjust the remedy to fit the equities of the specific case. The Copyright Act, for example, provides for awards of statutory damages in lieu of compensatory damages, and courts retain inherent equitable discretion regarding the awarding and tailoring of injunctive relief.
While fair use doctrine does require courts to consider the damage caused in the marketplace by a secondary work, this should not be a door that swings both ways. When the second work creates a substitute in the market for the underlying work, a finding of fair use is almost never warranted. The very fact that the second work acts as a substitute for the first is usually a powerful indicator that the use is not fair. But the converse is not true. It does not follow that the absence of economic damage proves that the use is fair. When a lazy appropriator gratuitously copies a photograph to create a satiric work that does not critique the substance or style of the photograph, an infringement occurs, and the lack of demonstrable economic harm should not turn what would otherwise be an infringement into a fair use. To the extent the negligible economic harm matters in such a case, it speaks to the fashioning of the remedy, not the existence of the right.
1. Kienitz v. Sconnie Nation LLC, 766 F.3d 756 (7th Cir. 2014).
2. Kienitz, 766 F.3d at 759.
3. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994).
4. See Charles Sanders & Steven Gordon, Strangers in Parodies: Weird Al and the Law of Musical Satire, 1 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 11 (1990).
5. 17 U.S.C. § 101 (emphasis added).
6. See Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207, 220 (1990) (articulating the importance of derivative works, observing that “[a]n author holds a bundle of exclusive rights in the copyrighted work, among them the right to copy and the right to incorporate the work into derivative works”).
7. Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithography Co., 188 U.S. 239, 249 (1903).
8. Bleistein, 188 U.S. at 249 (citations omitted).
9. See Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Assoc., 293 F. Supp. 130 (S.D.N.Y. 1968) (involving the unique video footage captured by Abraham Zapruder of the assassination of President Kennedy).
10. See Zalewski v. Cicero Builder Dev., Inc., 754 F.3d 95, 102-03 (2d Cir. 2014).
Comments: I disagree with you, Prof. Smolla, regarding what you see as the devastating effect that the Kienitz decision has on such far-removed subjects as the satire/parody distinction, the expansion of the fair use doctrine, and the supposedly dire long term impact of the decision on copyright law. Okay, you disagree with the decision; that is one thing – fair use decisions are almost always the result of subjective appraisals anyway, despite the efforts by some judges to bring objective analyses to their opinions. But bringing in the merger doctrine, the true origins of the Cheshire Cat, and the legal distinction between parody and satire, none of which concepts are present in the opinion, is to tack on to the ruling some unnecessary ponderous weights. You seem to agree with Judge Easterbrook that transforming a work would essentially create a derivative work, which as you both agree deprives a creator of one of the exclusive rights granted by the Copyright Act, but you then use this to quarrel with the finding of fair use. My take is that Judge Easterbrook’s criticism of the transformative analysis in fair use cases is essentially immaterial to his fair use finding. He in fact specifically rejects use of that concept and restricts his finding to use of the four statutory factors unconnected with transformation. We can all compare the photograph and the T-shirt in the Kienitz case and come to our own conclusions as to whether the T-shirt use is fair; we see with different eyes. Bogging the case down with sinister long-range implications would seem to be not only unnecessary, but time-wasting.
Comments: DISTRIBUTED for Conference of March 20, 2015. No. 14-815 Michael Kienitz v. Sconnie Nation, LLC, et al.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 § 101
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.