Rebecca Reyher and Ruth Gannett v. Children's Television Workshop and Tuesday Publications, Inc.’s Empirical Analysis
533 F.2d 87 · 1976
Citation profile
60 federal appellate · 7 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 194 later decisions — most recently August 2020 · most notably Sid & Marty Krofft Television Productions, Inc. And Sid & Marty Krofft Productions, Inc. v. McDonald Corporation and Needham, Harper & Steers, Inc., Defendants- Sid & Marty Krofft Television Productions, Inc. And Sid & Marty Krofft Productions, Inc. v. McDonald Corporation and Needham, Harper & Steers, Inc., Defendants (1977), Warner Bros Inc Ag Dc v. American Broadcasting Companies Inc J (1983)
60 federal appellate · 7 district ·
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.
Relationships
Relies on Mazer v. Stein · Arnstein v. Porter · Peter Pan Fabrics, Inc. v. Martin Weiner Corp. · Gay v. Parpart · Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corp.
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 194 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“emphasized repeatedly that the essence of infringement lies in taking not a general theme but its particular expression through similarities of treatment, details, scenes, events and characterization.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“It is an axiom of copyright law that the protection granted to a copyrightable work extends only to the particular expression of an idea and never to the idea itself.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“in Nichols : 16 (W)hen the plagiarist does not take out a block in situ, but an abstract of the whole, decision is more troublesome. Upon any work, and especially upon a play, a great number of patterns of increasing generality will fit equally well, as more and more of the incident is left out. The last may perhaps be no more than the most general statement of what the play is about, and at times might consist only of its title; but there is a point in this series of abstractions where they are no longer protected, since otherwise the playwright could prevent the use of his”
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.