Gary Friedrich Enterprises, LLC v. Marvel Characters, Inc.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• observing that failure to pay royalties must be sufficiently obvious to put \a reasonably diligent person\ on notice in order to imply repudiation
• noting that a copyright ownership claim would accrue when the defendant first communicates to the plaintiff that the defendant considers the work to be a work-for-hire
• explaining that, when interpreting a contract under New York law, courts must “not consider particular phrases in isolation, but rather interpret them in light of the parties’ intent as manifested by the contract as a whole”
• requiring the court to \construe the evidence in the light most favorable to the non-moving party and to draw all reasonable inferences in its favor\
• observing that “the [copyright] notice would have only indicated that [defendant] held the rights to the initial term of copyright,” and that the notice “would not have conclusively demonstrated that [defendant] was the author or otherwise had the right to register the renewal term”
• declining to find repudiation where defendant “repeatedly and publicly recognized” plaintiff as the creator of the Ghost Rider comic book, did not register a copyright in the comic book before plaintiff filed the subject action, and used the comic book “sparingly and in non-obvious ways”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).