Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation

How courts have described this case

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

• concluding that depiction of two young lovers was “so faintly indicated” that they were not characters protected by copyright
• concluding that the depiction of two young lovers was “so faintly indicated” that they were not characters protected by copyright
• finding that “A comedy based on conflicts between Irish and Jews, into which the marriage of their children enters, is no more susceptible to copyright protection than the outline of Romeo and Juliet.”
• “We hope that in this class of cases [expert] evidence may in the future be entirely excluded.”
• “[W]e are as aware as anyone that the line [between copyrighted material and non-copyrightable ideas], wherever it is drawn, will seem arbitrary”
• “the less developed the characters, the less they can be copyrighted; that is the penalty an author must bear for marking them too indistinctly”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).