No Rehearing in ‘Blurred Lines’ Copyright Infringement Case
Partner Mike Hobbs is quoted in a Bloomberg Law story titled, “No Rehearing in ‘Blurred Lines’ Copyright Infringement Case.” The story reports on developments in Williams v. Gaye – at issue was whether Pharrell Williams’s 2013 hit song “blurred lines” infringed a copyright in a 1977 Marvin Gaye song. On March 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” was entitled to broad copyright protection and upheld a verdict in favor of Gaye’s estate. On July 11, the court denied Thicke and Williams’s request to reconsider the case and amended its March ruling, deleting references to the inverse ratio rule, which courts previously have used to determine whether an accused infringer copied a prior work. Hobbs is quoted about the deletion, saying it “might send a signal that the inverse ratio rule is dead in copyright law. I think it’s about time. It’s one of those rules that has, to me, defied logic.”