Opinion ID: 218125
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Equivalent Right

Text: The second element for preemption is that the rights in the state law claims be equivalent to the exclusive rights under the Copyright Act. We summarized the rights of a copyright owner, detailed in § 106 of the Copyright Act, to be reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display of the copyrighted work. Toney, 406 F.3d at 909. A well-respected treatise has elaborated on this concept along the same lines, noting that equivalent rights exist if under state law the act of reproduction, performance, distribution, or display, no matter whether the law includes all such acts or only some, will in itself infringe the state-created right. 1 Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright § 1.01[B][1] (2010) (emphasis in original). [T]o avoid preemption, a state law must regulate conduct that is qualitatively distinguishable from that governed by federal copyright lawi.e., conduct other than reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display. Toney, 406 F.3d at 910. We have concluded that the material in disputethe equations, figures and textare not copyrightable. However, the Copyright Act can preempt state law even when the rights are claimed in uncopyrighted or uncopyrightable materials. We accepted this possibility in Baltimore Orioles, Inc. v. Major League Baseball Players Association, 805 F.2d 663, 676 (7th Cir.1986), when we determined that preemption applied even though the rights were asserted in work that was uncopyrightable. Again, in Toney, we noted that state laws that intrude on the domain of copyright are preempted even if the particular expression is neither copyrighted nor copyrightable. 406 F.3d at 911. In the Copyright Act, Congress sought to ensure that a state will not provide copyright-like protections in materials that should remain uncopyrighted or uncopyrightable. Id. [9] In their motion for summary judgment, the defendants assert that all of the plaintiffs' state law claims are alternative legal theories for recovery based on the alleged copying, R.81 at 13, and the defendants cite extensively to the plaintiffs' complaint as evidence. We consider separately whether each state law claim challenged on appeal is based on a right equivalent to those under the Copyright Act.
The complaint, with respect to conversion, states that the Defendants misappropriated the works by publishing said works and texts . . . and Defendants passed off said works and text as their own without giving credit to Plaintiffs. R.1 at 14 (emphasis added). In their response to the summary judgment motion, the plaintiffs elaborate that [b]y passing off the works as their own in numerous scientific publications, Defendants wrongfully and without authorization assumed control over them, which is actionable conversion. R.91 at 12. The conversion claim, then, is focused on the defendants' unauthorized publishing, not possession, of the protected work. Because publishing is a right under the Copyright Act, the conversion claim is preempted. The plaintiffs rely on Bilut v. Northwestern University, 296 Ill.App.3d 42, 230 Ill.Dec. 161, 692 N.E.2d 1327 (1998), as support for their contention that a conversion claim is not preempted by the Copyright Act. We cannot accept this argument. In Bilut, the plaintiff alleged loss of physical control over her research project, id., 230 Ill.Dec. 161, 692 N.E.2d at 1335, claiming that her professor usurped her ideas and then prohibited her from conducting a study, id., 230 Ill.Dec. 161, 692 N.E.2d at 1333. The plaintiff's claim of conversion in Bilut went beyond the publication of an idea. In this case, however, the plaintiffs have alleged conversion based solely on the defendants' publishing the information without attribution. The present case is much more like the situation that confronted our colleagues in the Fourth Circuit in United States ex. rel Berge v. Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama, 104 F.3d 1453 (4th Cir.1997). There, the court held that a claim of conversion was preempted because a charge of plagiarism and lack of attribution can only amount to, indeed, are tantamount to, a claim of copyright infringement, for [the plaintiff] has certainly not been prevented from using her own ideas and methods. Id. at 1464. On appeal, Professor Ho and Ms. Huang also rest their conversion claim on Mr. Chang's failure to return Professor Ho's 2002 notebook. Yet, the plaintiffs failed to raise sufficiently this argument in their summary judgment papers. In their response to the summary judgment motion, the plaintiffs simply made a general assertion that tangible property was taken without permission, followed by a citation to their statement of additional facts. The statement of additional facts, however, does not identify what tangible property was taken without permission and makes no mention of the 2002 notebook in particular. It was incumbent on the plaintiffs to identify with particularity the factual basis for their claim. See Anderson, 477 U.S. at 250, 106 S.Ct. 2505. They failed to do so. We therefore must conclude that, based on the plaintiffs' summary judgment filings, the rights asserted in the conversion claim concerned the misappropriation of their work through publication, which is equivalent to the right to control publication under the Copyright Act.
As a general proposition, a claim of common law fraud is not preempted by the Copyright Act so long as the causes of action concerning them contain elements that are different from copyright infringement. Allied Artists Pictures Corp. v. Rhodes, 496 F.Supp. 408, 444 (S.D.Ohio 1980), aff'd in part, remanded in part, 679 F.2d 656 (6th Cir.1982); see also Valente-Kritzer Video v. Pinckney, 881 F.2d 772, 776 (9th Cir.1989). A claim of fraud can be, however, a disguised copyright infringement claim, if the sole basis of the fraud claim is that a defendant represented materials as his own. Nimmer & Nimmer, supra, § 1.01[B][1][e]. Here, the complaint alleges that the defendants knowingly published material taken from the plaintiffs and that defendants fraudulently represented that they were the originators of the work. R.1 at 14. Additionally, in their response to the summary judgment motion, the plaintiffs asserted that Defendants have, in essence, `passed off'[ [10] ] Plaintiffs' works as their own by using and representing Plaintiffs' copyrighted materials as their own work, R.91 at 13, and that plagiarism is a type of fraud that is actionable. R.91 at 12. Professor Ho and Ms. Huang's allegations of fraud therefore amount to a claim that the defendants have published without attribution, thereby misrepresenting the true origins of the work. The plaintiffs do not allege in their summary judgment filings any other misrepresentation by the defendants. Because the fraud claim is based on the defendants' improper publishing alone, it is preempted by the Copyright Act. See R.W. Beck, Inc. v. E3 Consulting, LLC, 577 F.3d 1133, 1148 (10th Cir.2009) (finding the plaintiff's fraud claim was preempted because [t]he crux of the allegations is that [the defendant] represented to the public that the reports it distributed were its own when, in fact, they were copies of [the plaintiff's] reports). [11]
In their complaint, Professor Ho and Ms. Huang allege that the Defendants misappropriated Plaintiffs' trade secrets. R.1 at 15. In their response to summary judgment, they note that they took steps to keep their works secret. R.91 at 13. Under Illinois law, the definition of a trade secret requires that the information is sufficiently secret to derive economic value and is subject to efforts to maintain its secrecy or confidentiality. 765 ILCS 1065/2(d). A trade secret misappropriation involves the acquisition of a trade secret through improper means, which requires the breach of a confidential relationship or other duty to maintain secrecy. See 765 ILCS 1065/2(a), (b). A claim of trade secret misappropriation, then, requires that the information have a status of secrecy and that a confidential relationship be breached. Both of these elements go beyond the rights regulated under the Copyright Act. [12] The act of publishing the allegedly copied materials would not itself establish a trade secrets misappropriation claim. Because a claim for trade secrets misappropriation regulates conduct beyond the rights under the Copyright Act, it is not preempted. In sum, Professor Ho and Ms. Huang's claims of conversion and fraud assert the same interests as those under the Copyright Act: to control the publication of the copyrighted work. [13] Accordingly, the plaintiffs' claims of conversion and fraud are preempted under the Copyright Act, and we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment on that basis. By contrast, the trade secrets claim asserts a right very different from the rights protected by the Copyright Act, and, therefore, with respect to that allegation, we cannot rest our decision on preemption, but must reach the substantive merits of that state claim.