Opinion ID: 2817831
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Similarity to Treating Explosive Kids

Text: Ablon argues that his co-ownership of Treating Explosive Kids means that certain of the challenged slides should have been found non-infringing as a matter of law and excluded from evidence at trial. The court refused to admit evidence of expression from Ablon's slides that was reproduced verbatim from Treating Explosive Kids. However, the court allowed Greene to introduce evidence from the slides that was similar to expression found in the joint work, including slides one through four, and allowed the jury to decide whether those slides infringed on Greene's solely owned work, The Explosive Child. Ablon's argument, in effect, is that he was entitled to judgment as a matter of law on slides one through four because he has a right, as co-owner of Treating Explosive Kids, not only to take verbatim expressions from that book, but also to create probatively similar works.28 In other words, he sees his slides as derivative works vis-a-vis Treating Explosive Kids and, as coowner of that book, he claims a right to create such derivatives. 28 Greene argues that Ablon's use of probative similarity is misplaced, and that substantial similarity is the proper metric in this context. The dispute is immaterial. The difference between the two terms lies in their respective roles in the copyright infringement analysis. See T-Peg, Inc. v. Vt. Timber Works, Inc., 459 F.3d 97, 108, 111 (1st Cir. 2006) (explaining that substantial similarity is used to evaluate copying, and probative similarity is used to show actual copying indirectly). However, Ablon's argument does not require us to differentiate between particular stages of the copyright infringement analysis. -46- Ablon is certainly correct that the co-owner of a joint work has a right to create derivative works, such as PowerPoint slides, subject to the accounting rights of his co-owner. However, he misunderstands the nature of derivative works. A derivative work is simply an infringing work made non-infringing through the acquisition of permission to use the underlying preexisting expression. See TMTV, Corp. v. Mass Prods., Inc., 645 F.3d 464, 471 (1st Cir. 2011) (characterizing an infringing work as an unauthorized derivative work); see also 1 Nimmer § 3.01 (explaining that a work will be considered a derivative work only if[, but for permission to use the underlying work,] it would be considered an infringing work). When a work derives from multiple preexisting sources, it is not sufficient for the author to obtain permission to use expression from one preexisting source but not the others. Here, Ablon ignores the possibility that his slides may be derivative of both Treating Explosive Kids and The Explosive Child. Although he had a right to make derivative works of the former, he had no rights in the latter.29 Hence, the fact that Ablon's slides may have derived from Treating Explosive Kids is not sufficient to prove, as a matter of law, that the slides did not 29 Even if Treating Explosive Kids is itself a derivative work, whatever permission Ablon would have had to use expression from The Explosive Child in the joint-derivative work would not have extended to further derivative works, like the slides. See, e.g., Oddo, 743 F.2d at 633-34. -47- infringe on The Explosive Child. Accordingly, the district court correctly denied judgment as a matter of law with respect to slides one through four and properly admitted them into evidence.