Towler v. Sayles’s Empirical Analysis
76 F.3d 579 · 1996
Citation profile
20 federal appellate · 5 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 55 later decisions — most recently September 2016 · most notably Lyons Partnership Lp v. Morris Costumes Incorporated (2001), Herzog v. Castle Rock Entertainment (1999)
20 federal appellate · 5 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 Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. · Ferguson v. National Broadcasting Co. · Litchfield v. Spielberg · Trandes Corporation v. Guy F. Atkinson Company, and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority · Gaste v. Kaiserman
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 55 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A court may infer that the alleged infringer had a reasonable possibility of access if the author sent the copyrighted work to a third party intermediary who has a close relationship with the infringer. An intermediary will fall within this category, for example, if she supervises or works in the same department as the infringer or contributes creative ideas to him.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“mere possibility that such an opportunity could have arisen”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“extrinsically similar because they contain substantially similar ideas that are subject to copyright protection.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.