Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co.’s Empirical Analysis
188 U.S. 239 · 1903
Citation profile
251 federal appellate · 75 district · 20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 645 later decisions (29 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2024 · most notably Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991), Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid (1989)
251 federal appellate · 75 district · 20 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Appellate journey
reviewedCourier Lithographing Co. v. Donaldson Lithographing Co. (from Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on United States v. Steffens · Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony · Callaghan v. Myers · Baker v. Selden
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 645 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted, for instance, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge.”
21 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“something irreducible, which is one [band's] alone.”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Certainly works are not the less connected with the fine arts because their pictorial quality attracts the crowd and therefore gives them a real use-if use means to increase trade and to help to make money. A picture is none the less a picture and none the less a subject of copyright that it is used for an advertisement. And if pictures may be used to advertise soap, or the theatre, or monthly magazines, as they are, they may be used to advertise a circus.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.