Source: https://casetext.com/case/gracen-v-bradford-exchange
Timestamp: 2019-03-24 09:23:03
Document Index: 554427274

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1291', '§ 103', '§ 101', '§ 102', '§ 106', '§ 103', '§ 10', 'Art 178', '§ 2']

Gracen v. Bradford Exchange, 698 F.2d 300 | Casetext
ReadReadAttorney AnalysesAnalyses2lockCiting BriefsBriefs3lockCiting CasesCiting Cases51
Gracenv.Bradford Exchange
United States Court of Appeals, Seventh CircuitJan 12, 1983
Robert W. Gettleman, Arthur Don, D'Ancona Pflaum, Chicago, Ill., for defendants, counterplaintiffs-appellees.
Before BAUER and POSNER, Circuit Judges, and HOFFMAN, Senior District Judge.
Of the Eastern District of Virginia.
Gracen's counsel describes Auckland's painting of Dorothy as a "piratical copy" of her painting. Bradford could easily have refuted this charge, if it is false, by attaching to its motion for summary judgment a photograph of its Dorothy plate, but it did not, and for purposes of this appeal we must assume that the plate is a copy of Miss Gracen's painting. This is not an absurd supposition. Bradford, at least at first, was rapturous about Miss Gracen's painting of Dorothy. It called Miss Gracen "a true prodigy." It said that hers "was the one painting that conveyed the essence of Judy's character in the film . . . the painting that left everybody saying, `That's Judy in Oz.'" Auckland's deposition states that Bradford gave him her painting with directions to "clean it up," which he understood to mean: do the same thing but make it "a little more professional."
The district court granted summary judgment against Miss Gracen on both the main claim and the counterclaim. It held that she could not copyright her painting and drawings because they were not original and that she had infringed MGM's copyright. The court entered judgment for $1500 on the counterclaim. Neither the judgment nor the opinion accompanying it refers to the noncopyright claims in the counterclaim, thus inviting the question whether that judgment is final and hence appealable under 28 U.S.C. § 1291. But this is not a serious problem, because the judgment purports to dispose of "their [MGM's and Bradford's] counterclaims" and both sides have treated it as disposing of the counterclaim in its entirety. The non-copyright claims must therefore be regarded as having been either dismissed or abandoned.
The briefs and argument in this court follow the district court in treating the principal question as whether Miss Gracen's painting and drawings are sufficiently original to be copyrightable as derivative works under 17 U.S.C. § 103. But this emphasis may be misplaced. The question of the copyrightability of a derivative work ("a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a[n] . . . art reproduction . . . or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted," 17 U.S.C. § 101) usually arises in connection with something either made by the owner (or a licensee) of the copyright on the underlying work, as in Durham Industries, Inc. v. Tomy Corp., 630 F.2d 905, 909 (2d Cir. 1980), or derived from an underlying work that is in the public domain, as in L. Batlin Son, Inc. v. Snyder, 536 F.2d 486, 491-92 (2d Cir. 1976) (en banc). At issue in such a case is not the right to copy the underlying work but whether there is enough difference between the derivative and the underlying work to satisfy the statutory requirement of originality, see 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), and thus make the derivative work copyrightable. Since the copyright owner's bundle of exclusive rights includes the right "to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work," 17 U.S.C. § 106(2), even if Miss Gracen's painting and drawings had enough originality to be copyrightable as derivative works she could not copyright them unless she had authority to use copyrighted materials from the movie. "[P]rotection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully." 17 U.S.C. § 103(a).
Miss Gracen does not claim that she painted the 16-year-old Judy Garland who appeared in "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939 from life or from photographs taken from the movie, or that her painting is not of Judy Garland but is an imaginative conception of the character Dorothy. The painting was based on the movie, both as independently recollected by Miss Gracen and as frozen in the still photographs that Bradford supplied her. As with any painting there was an admixture of the painter's creativity — how much we shall consider later — but that it is a painting of Judy Garland as she appears in photographs from the movie (such as the photograph reproduced at the end of this opinion as Figure 2), and is therefore a derivative work, is beyond question. The same is true of the drawings.
It is less likely that Miss Gracen was entitled to exhibit, or even to make, the drawings. Their making was no part of the contest. Yet she testified that Foster told her to make the drawings to improve her chances of winning, and this testimony was not contradicted or inherently incredible. If she was authorized to make the drawings maybe she was also authorized — or reasonably believed she was authorized — to exhibit them, at least if she did not come to terms with Bradford.
The grant of summary judgment on the counterclaim was therefore erroneous — assuming an oral nonexclusive copyright license is enforceable. Nimmer describes this as the law both before and after the Copyright Act was revised in 1976, see 3 Nimmer on Copyright §§ 10.03[A]-[B] at pp. 10-36 to 10-37 and nn. 17, 22, 23 (1982), and though support for this conclusion is sparse, and there is some contrary authority, see Douglas Int'l Corp. v. Baker, 335 F. Supp. 282, 285 (S.D.N.Y. 1971), we think Nimmer is right. This case shows why. MGM and Bradford do not even argue that Bradford had no authority to permit Miss Gracen to make a derivative work, though nothing in the license to Bradford purports to authorize sublicensing. They thus tacitly acknowledge the impracticality of requiring written licenses in all circumstances; and we do not see how it can be argued that only the existence and not the scope of a license can be proved by parol evidence.
This disposes of the counterclaim, but we have still to consider Miss Gracen's claim that she had valid copyrights which the defendants infringed. The initial issue is again the scope of her implied license from Bradford. Even if she was authorized to exhibit her derivative works, she may not have been authorized to copyright them. Bradford was licensed to use MGM's copyright in its series of collectors' plates but not to copyright the derivative works thus created. A copyright owner is naturally reluctant to authorize a licensee to take out copyrights on derivative works — copyrights that might impede him in making his own derivative works or in licensing others to do so. And it would have made no more sense for Bradford, the licensee, to arm Miss Gracen, its sublicensee, with a weapon — the right to copyright her derivative works — that she could use to interfere with Bradford's efforts to get another artist to do the plates if it could not cut a deal with her. The affidavits submitted with the motions for summary judgment deny that Miss Gracen was authorized to copyright derivative works based on the movie and are not contradicted on this point. (In contrast, they do not deny that she was authorized to exhibit her painting of Dorothy.)
We are reluctant to stop here, though, and uphold the dismissal of the complaint on the basis of an issue of fact that the district judge did not address, and that we therefore may have got wrong, so we shall go on and consider his ground for dismissal of the complaint — that Miss Gracen's painting and drawings are not original enough to be copyrightable.
Miss Gracen reminds us that judges can make fools of themselves pronouncing on aesthetic matters. But artistic originality is not the same thing as the legal concept of originality in the Copyright Act. Artistic originality indeed might inhere in a detail, a nuance, a shading too small to be apprehended by a judge. A contemporary school of art known as "Super Realism" attempts with some success to make paintings that are indistinguishable to the eye from color photographs. See Super Realism: A Critical Anthology (Battcock ed. 1975). These paintings command high prices; buyers must find something original in them. Much Northern European painting of the Renaissance is meticulously representational, see, e.g., Gombrich, The Story of Art 178-80 (13th ed. 1978), and therefore in a sense — but not an aesthetic sense — less "original" than Cubism or Abstract Expressionism. A portrait is not unoriginal for being a good likeness.
But especially as applied to derivative works, the concept of originality in copyright law has as one would expect a legal rather than aesthetic function — to prevent overlapping claims. See L. Batlin Son, Inc. v. Snyder, supra, 536 F.2d at 491-92. Suppose Artist A produces a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, a painting in the public domain, which differs slightly from the original. B also makes a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. A, who has copyrighted his derivative work, sues B for infringement. B's defense is that he was copying the original, not A's reproduction. But if the difference between the original and A's reproduction is slight, the difference between A's and B's reproductions will also be slight, so that if B had access to A's reproductions the trier of fact will be hard-pressed to decide whether B was copying A or copying the Mona Lisa itself. Miss Gracen's drawings illustrate the problem. They are very similar both to the photographs from the movie and to the plates designed by Auckland. Auckland's affidavit establishes that he did not copy or even see her drawings. But suppose he had seen them. Then it would be very hard to determine whether he had been copying the movie stills, as he was authorized to do, or copying her drawings.
The painting of Dorothy presents a harder question. A comparison of Figures 1 and 2 reveals perceptible differences. A painting (except, perhaps, one by a member of the Super Realist school mentioned earlier) is never identical to the subject painted, whether the subject is a photograph, a still life, a landscape, or a model, because most painters cannot and do not want to achieve a photographic likeness of their subject. Nevertheless, if the differences between Miss Gracen's painting of Dorothy and the photograph of Judy Garland as Dorothy were sufficient to make the painting original in the eyes of the law, then a painting by an Auckland also striving, as per his commission, to produce something "very recognizable as everybody's Judy/Dorothy" would look like the Gracen painting, to which he had access; and it would be difficult for the trier of fact to decide whether Auckland had copied her painting or the original movie stills. True, the background in Miss Gracen's painting differs from that in Figure 2, but it is drawn from the movie set. We do not consider a picture created by superimposing one copyrighted photographic image on another to be "original" — always bearing in mind that the purpose of the term in copyright law is not to guide aesthetic judgments but to assure a sufficiently gross difference between the underlying and the derivative work to avoid entangling subsequent artists depicting the underlying work in copyright problems.
We are speaking, however, only of the requirement of originality in derivative works. If a painter paints from life, no court is going to hold that his painting is not copyrightable because it is an exact photographic likeness. If that were the rule photographs could not be copyrighted — the photographs of Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz," for example — but of course they can be, 1 Nimmer on Copyright § 2.08[E] (1982). The requirement of originality is significant chiefly in connection with derivative works, where if interpreted too liberally it would paradoxically inhibit rather than promote the creation of such works by giving the first creator a considerable power to interfere with the creation of subsequent derivative works from the same underlying work.
Justice Holmes' famous opinion in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., 188 U.S. 239, 23 S.Ct. 298, 47 L.Ed. 460 (1903), heavily relied on by Miss Gracen, is thus not in point. The issue was whether lithographs of a circus were copyrightable under a statute (no longer in force) that confined copyright to works "connected with the fine arts." Holmes' opinion is a warning against using aesthetic criteria to answer the question. If Miss Gracen had painted Judy Garland from life, her painting would be copyrightable even if we thought it Kitsch; but a derivative work must be substantially different from the underlying work to be copyrightable. This is the test of L. Batlin Son, Inc. v. Snyder, supra, 536 F.2d at 491, a decision of the Second Circuit — the nation's premier copyright court — sitting en banc. Earlier Second Circuit cases discussed in Batlin that suggest a more liberal test must be considered superseded.