Re: copyright notice on contract

From: Jessica Litman <litman[_at_]mindspring.com>
Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 20:57:21 -0400

On 8/27/99, Steven D. Jamar <sjamar[_at_]law.howard.edu> wrote:
>
> I don't think the copyright of a contract protects much because most
> of the important stuff are actually ideas and there are relatively
> limited numbers of ways expressing the ideas in legally precise
> language, trivial sentence structure differences aside.
>
> Has anyone looked into this? I can't believe that a court would
> protect partiular contract clauses from being copied by another
> attorney or client and I can't believe that the SSO would be
> protectible or the selection of what to include.
 

     There is actually a case: Donald v. Zack Meyer's TV, 426 F.2d 1027 (5th Cir. 1970). Mr. Donald dropped out of law school after a year and went into the business of printing business invoices. He drafted and registered the contract language that appeared on the bottom of these invoices, and sued Moore's when, at the request of one of Donald's former customers, it added Donald's language to the forms it printed. The district court ruled that Moore's had infringed Donald's copyright. The 5th Circuit reversed, finding Donald's copyrights invalid for want of originality. In essence the court concluded that Donald *must* *have* copied the language from legal form books available in the law library during the year he was in law school. I wouldn't even try to defend the court's rationale, but most courts would have reached the same result.

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Jessica Litman
Professor of Law, Wayne State University litman[_at_]mindspring.com Received on Sun Aug 29 1999 - 01:00:17 GMT