Copyhype

Cross-posted on the Law Theories blog.

Representing himself before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Andrew Diversey has managed to set a very interesting precedent (opinion available here or here). Senior Circuit Judge Terrence L. O’Brien, writing for a unanimous panel, held that when a library adds a work to its collection, indexes it, and makes it available to library patrons, a distribution is deemed to have occurred even if there is no evidence that any patron actually accessed the work.

The underlying brouhaha concerned Diversey’s dissertation as a doctoral candidate at the University of New Mexico. Against his express wishes, two copies of his dissertation had been made available to the public in the school’s libraries. Diversey sued the school and several administrators for violation of his exclusive distribution right under Section 106(3).

Diversey’s opening brief before the Tenth Circuit was remarkably well-researched and well-written for a pro se advocate, and he cited the Nimmer copyright treatise at length in arguing that merely making a work available constitutes distribution. I wrote about the fact that the Nimmer treatise has changed its tune on the making available issue in a previous post, and I predicted that, given how influential Nimmer is in the copyright realm, others would follow. ¹For the argument that Nimmer was wrong to change its tune on the making available issue, see Rick Sanders, Will Professor Nimmer’s Change of Heart on File Sharing Matter?, 15 Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 857 (2013).

And follow they did. Relying on the Fourth Circuit’s holding in Hotaling and the Nimmer treatise, the Court of Appeals reasoned:

As Diversey points out, § 106(3) explicitly protects the copyright owner’s exclusive right to distribute copies by lending. See Hotaling, 118 F.3d at 203 (“When a public library adds a work to its collection, lists the work in its index or catalog system, and makes the work available to the borrowing or browsing public, it has completed all the steps necessary for distribution to the public.”); 2 Melville Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright § 8.11[B][4][d] at 8–154.10 (2013) (“No consummated act of actual distribution need be demonstrated … to implicate the copyright owner’s distribution right.”). . . . The essence of distribution in the library lending context is the work’s availability “to the borrowing or browsing public.” See Hotaling, 118 F.3d at 203. ²Diversey v. Schmidly, 2013 WL 6727517 at *4-5 (10th Cir. Dec. 23, 2013).

The Tenth Circuit rejected the appellees’ argument that Diversey had to prove actual dissemination to the public:

The appellees argue [that] merely listing the work in the libraries’ catalog information system does not violate Diversey’s distribution right. They say Diversey must (but has failed to) allege the libraries actually distributed an unauthorized copy to a member of the public. They cite Atlantic Recording Corp. v. Howell, 554 F.Supp.2d 976 (D. Ariz. 2008) to suggest “‘§ 106(3) is not violated unless the defendant has actually distributed an unauthorized copy of the work to a member of the public.’” (Appellee’s Br. 14 (quoting Howell, 554 F.Supp.2d at 883).)

Howell does reflect some dissensus, particularly among district courts, about the applicability of Hotaling’s holding to cases of Internet file-sharing. We need not delve into the file-sharing issue today. Hotaling, like this case, involves a public library making “the work available to the borrowing or browsing public.” Hotaling, 118 F.3d at 203. A patron could “visit the library and use the work.” See id. This is the essence of a violation of the copyright owner’s exclusive right to distribute his work via lending. See 17 U.S.C. § 106(3); Peter S. Menell, In Search of Copyright’s Lost Ark: Interpreting the Right to Distribute in the Internet Age, 59 J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 1, 52–66 (2011) (analyzing the legislative history regarding the distribution right and concluding the requirement of actual distribution of an unauthorized copy is unwarranted). ³Id. at *4 n.7 (citation omitted).

The applicability of the Hotaling holding to this case was pretty straightforward since both cases involved libraries lending out works to the general public. In Hotaling, the Fourth Circuit stated that distribution normally requires a showing that the work was actually disseminated to the public, but in the case of a library that keeps no records of public access to its works, it would unfairly prejudice the plaintiff to require any such proof of access. ⁴See Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 118 F.3d 199, 203 (4th Cir. 1997). Thus, the evidentiary issue was central to the Fourth Circuit’s holding.

Interestingly, for the argument that distribution requires actual dissemination, the Hotaling court cited the Eighth Circuit’s opinion in National Car ⁵See Nat’l Car Rental Sys., Inc. v. Computer Associates Int’l, Inc., 991 F.2d 426, 433-34 (8th Cir. 1993). and the Nimmer treatise. National Car, in turn, cited only the Nimmer treatise for that proposition. So the notion in the Fourth and Eighth Circuits that distribution typically requires actual dissemination can be traced back to earlier versions of the Nimmer treatise. As I said in that previous post, it really is hard to exaggerate just how influential Nimmer is in copyright law.

Now we have the Tenth Circuit relying on the Nimmer treatise as well as the journal article by Professor Peter S. Menell, which was the impetus for the about-face on the making available issue in the Nimmer treatise. ⁶See Peter S. Menell, In Search of Copyright’s Lost Ark: Interpreting the Right to Distribute in the Internet Age, 59 J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 1 (2011). The Tenth Circuit here explicitly declined to discuss the applicability of its holding to the file-sharing context, but I think the answer there is fairly clear. Several district courts have declined to extend the holding of Hotaling to file-sharing cases, citing the general rule that actual dissemination is required and reasoning that the same evidentiary problem found in the library context may not obtain when it’s file-sharing. ⁷See Atl. Recording Corp. v. Howell, 554 F.Supp.2d 976, 981-85 (D. Ariz. 2008) (gathering cases).

But the Tenth Circuit here has unequivocally adopted Nimmer’s new tune, which states that merely making the work available to the public is sufficient to constitute distribution. And it approvingly cited Professor Menell’s article, which reaches the same conclusion. Moreover, the Tenth Circuit adopted Hotaling’s holding without mentioning the underlying evidentiary rationale applicable in the library context that led other courts to distinguish its holding in the file-sharing context. While the Tenth Circuit did not address whether its holding would apply to file-sharing, it’s really difficult to see how it would not.

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