Thomas Walker v. Time Life Films, Inc., David Susskind, Gill Champion, Martin Richards and Heywood Gould

How courts have described this case

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

• holding that “federal courts, absent exceptional circumstances, should abstain from exercising pendent jurisdiction when federal claims in a case can be disposed of by summary judgment”
• holding that plaintiff’s state law unfair competition claim, based on defendants’ use of plaintiff’s book in a motion picture, was preempted “to the extent it seeks protection against copying of . . . [the] book”
• noting that Second Circuit generally judges substantial similarity “by the spontaneous response of the ordinary lay observer”
• noting that copyright protection “does not extend to facts or to true events, even if discovered through original research”
• noting that historical events are “in the public domain and beyond the scope of copyright protection.”
• noting that historical events are “in the public domain and beyond the scope of copyright protection.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).