Cut your copyright litigation costs

01 February 2010

A new trend in US copyright cases could save litigants thousands of dollars in discovery costs. Simon Frankel, Shannon Nestor and John Freed explain how

Most in-house counsel at content companies have had the following experience: a newly filed complaint arrives, asserting that someone wrote a brilliant work that was blatantly copied by the company. For example, the complaint alleges that the plaintiff wrote a treatment for a television show, sent it to the studio for consideration, and heard nothing. Then, two years later, the studio aired a show that was, the complaint says, just like the treatment, stealing its basic plot and characters and wilfully infringing the copyright. After reviewing the draft complaint, in-house counsel conducts a quick investigation and concludes that the plaintiff's treatment never got past an initial screening at the studio, so that no one at the studio involved with the show actually ever heard of or read the treatment. That means there was no copying, and therefore no copyright infringement. But the in-house counsel is only partly relieved, cogitating on...

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