Institute for the Development of Earth Awareness v. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

The firm obtained summary judgment in favor of client People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (“PETA”) on a copyright infringement claim brought against PETA in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In its 2008 complaint, plaintiff The Institute for the Development of Earth Awareness (“IDEA”) alleged that PETA’s Animal Liberation Project Campaign (“ALP”) infringed a book written by IDEA’s principal, Marjorie Spiegel, titled The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. The Court concluded that: (i) IDEA was impermissibly trying to copyright “unprotectable ideas based largely on facts, many of a historical nature”; (ii) the idea of comparing human and animal oppression in these time frames was not even original to Ms. Spiegel or IDEA, as the ideas had been discussed before in numerous other works; (iii) there was “nothing original” about the book’s use of third-party quotations from well-known thinkers; (iv) IDEA’s claims alleging that PETA copied the book because both the ALP and the book allegedly use juxtaposed images should be rejected, holding that “it is commonplace for a work comparing or contrasting seemingly disparate events to contain side-by-side illustrations”; and (v) after a comparison of the works, IDEA’s claim that the book and the ALP had a similar “total concept and feel” as the result of combining allegedly similar elements should be rejected. In sum, the Court concluded that “no reasonable jury . . . could find that PETA engaged in unauthorized copying of original components of [plaintiff’s] work.”