Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation v. Wall-Street.com, LLC

Whether “registration of [a] copyright claim has been made” within the meaning of § 411(a) when the copyright holder delivers the required application, deposit, and fee to the Copyright Office, as the Fifth and Ninth Circuits have held, or only once the Copyright Office acts on that application, as the Tenth and, in the decision below, the Eleventh Circuit have held.

Petitioner is a news organization that owns the copyrights of its journalists’ products. The media products are funneled through a cloud system, (“AHN”) which then licenses the works to outside organizations.  Respondent is a licensee of AHN. As part of that license, Respondent was obligated to remove Petitioner’s products if the agreement was cancelled.  That happened here; Respondent cancelled the agreement but continued to distribute Petitioner’s work product.  Petitioner brought a lawsuit against Respondent and also “filed its application for registration with the Copyright Office[.]” That application is still pending. Below, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that the language of the statute requires action on the part of the Copyright Office.  In other words, filing the application is not sufficient for an aggrieved party to bring a copyright infringement suit. Petitioner contends that the rule from the Circuit Court creates practical litigation complications: (1) having to wait for application approval gives the infringing party the benefit of the product until the application is approved; (2) the approval process may take longer than the statute of limitations allows, leaving the aggrieved party no legal remedy; and (3) the rule allows for futile litigation because, upon approval, the filing party will incur a financial loss by filing another suit.  Petitioner urges the court to resolve this question because of the reasons stated above as well as the circuit split.