Background information

A map publisher used plaintiff’s CC-licensed Flickr photo on the cover of its commercially available atlas. The attribution and license information for the photo were included on the back cover of the atlas. Plaintiff sued for copyright infringement and asserted a DMCA Section 1202 claim for distribution of false copyright management information.

Case summary

Plaintiff alleged copyright infringement based on three different factors: (1) failure to comply with the ShareAlike condition, (2) failure to provide proper notice of the CC license, and (3) failure to give proper attribution. On August 18, 2015, the district court of D.C. granted summary judgment to defendant holding that: (1) the ShareAlike condition was not violated because the atlas was not a derivative work of the plaintiff’s photograph; (2) providing the license name was sufficient to satisfy the obligation to provide the URI of the license; and (3) attribution that was comparable in prominence to the attribution given to individual maps in the atlas was sufficient for purposes of fulfilling CC license attribution requirements. The court also dismissed the Section 1202 claim on summary judgment.