Law Commons^™

Seeing’S Insight: Toward A Visual Substantial Similarity Test For Copyright Infringement Of Pictorial, Graphic, And Sculptural Works, Moon Hee Lee

Northwestern University Law Review

Before imposing liability for copyright infringement, a court analyzes whether the defendant’s allegedly infringing work is substantially similar to the copyright-holder plaintiff’s allegedly infringed work. This substantial similarity analysis broadly contains two steps. First, facts and ideas do not receive copyright protection and are filtered out. Second, the two works are compared to see if there is material overlap between the two works’ remaining creative expression—i.e., whether or not the two works are substantially similar. This two-step approach furthers the delicate dual goal of copyright law to keep ideas and facts freely available as raw material for creation while awarding …