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What Is Standard Tomorrow, May Not Have Been Today: An Argument For Claiming ScèNes À Faire, Logan Sandler
What Is Standard Tomorrow, May Not Have Been Today: An Argument For Claiming ScèNes À Faire, Logan Sandler
University of Miami Law Review
Recent lawsuits involving the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise and the Oscar award-winning movie The Shape of Water required courts to wrestle with the application of the decisive scènes à faire doctrine. In doing so, the Ninth Circuit exposed the doctrine’s chief pitfall: the lack of a temporal framework.
The modern scènes à faire doctrine limits the scope of what authors can claim as substantially similar by excluding the standard or stock elements in a given expressive work from copyright protection. Courts will often conclude that a contested element is scènes à faire if it can be demonstrated that …