User:Theleekycauldron/Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States

Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 17, 1974 Decided February 25, 1975
Full case name	Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States
Citations	420 U.S. 376 (more)
Case history
Prior	487 F.2d 1345 (Ct. Cl. 1973)
Holding
Court of Claims held that it was a fair use for libraries to photocopy articles for use by patrons engaged in scientific research. The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Supreme Court.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William O. Douglas · William J. Brennan Jr. Potter Stewart · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell Jr. · William Rehnquist
Case opinion
Per curiam
Blackmun took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States, 487 F.2d 1345 (Ct. Cl. 1973),

The Supreme Court, finding itself equally divided, issued a short per curiam opinion affirming the Court of Claims's decision.

Background

Copyright, copying, and case facts

In the United States, copyright is protected by a clause in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, giving Congress the power "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Copyright financially incentivizes the production of mass media in a free market; by giving copyright holders the ability to "control the cost of and access to" their work, [TKTK] (Yanow 1974, p. 311; footnotes on p 651 of Cirace 1984)

• how exactly does monopoly provide financial incentive?
• rework so "copyright" (jargony) is placed after its definition.
• use "print, vend" from Yanow

But if the privileges of copyright were enforced to the letter, it would stymie the constitutional goal of encouraging development in the arts and sciences [how?]. To combat this, the courts [which?] developed the fair use doctrine, a limited carve-out to the rights of the copyright holder. Whether or not the use of a work is fair use or copyright infringement depends on four factors, as articulated by the Register of Copyrights and later recognized in the Copyright Act of 1976: "(1) the purpose of the use, (2) the nature of the copyrighted work, (3) the amount and substantiality of the material used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole, and (4) the effect of the use on the copyright owner's potential market for his work." No one of these factors is definitive; courts generally engage in a complex weighing of these factors against each other in order to make a case-by-case determination. Because of its ambiguity, fair use has been called "one of the most troublesome issues in the whole of copyright." [by who?] (Sword 1975)

• talk more about the interests of libraries in photocopying
• printing, xerography, gentleman's agreement
• NLM/NIH
• fair use
• can something be infringement and fair use? what is fair use, mechanically?

[tension between libraries and publishers] To resolve these tensions, publishers and researchers reached a gentlemen's agreement in 1935 that allowed libraries to make photocopies of journal articles for researchers, rather than keeping a single article available for loan or copying articles by hand. At that time, photocopying was primarily done slowly and expensively via a Photostat machine; but by 1950, commercially available technology provided faster copying for less than ten cents per page. That technological development upset the balance of the agreement (Murdock 1974)

Two of the libraries that regularly photocopied journal articles were the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine, both U.S. government agencies.

Some of these journals were copyrighted by Williams & Wilkins Co., the publisher of 37 medical journals including Gastroenterology, the Journal of Immunology, Medicine, and Pharmacological Reviews.

Court of Claims and jurisdiction

The United States Court of Claims was created in 1855 to hear lawsuits against the United States. While it was initially understood to be an agency of Congress and the Treasury Secretary, and later an Article I tribunal under Congress, it was moved into the federal courts system in 1953. The Court of Claims consisted of a seven-judge panel that met in Washington, D.C.; cases were initially heard and decided by a trial commissioner who would establish the facts of the case and sometimes opine on matters of law, and their findings could be appealed to the full court.(Wilson 1975, pp. 1401–1402)

The United States government has sovereign immunity in American courts, including immunity from lawsuits. The Court of Claims held in Lanman v. United States (1892) that this immunity extends to copyright infringement lawsuits. However, Congress can pass a law opening the government up to lawsuit, and in 1960 they did exactly that, allowing lawsuits for copyright infringement to be filed against the United States in the Court of Claims, which could award monetary compensation for damages only. The law also provided that decisions made by the Court of Claims under this statute are to be appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States was the first lawsuit the Court of Claims decided under the new law. (Wilson 1975, p. 1403; Yanow 1974, fn. 7)

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 420
• CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada (2004)
• Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (1982)
• American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc. (1995)

Notes and references

Works cited

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