OVERVIEW OF SIGNIFICANT DECISIONS IN 2001 Hoffman v. Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., 255 F.3d 1180 (9th Cir. 2001) This case involved an appeal from a judgment by the District Court in favor actor Dustin Hoffman. The District Court found that the use of a doctored photograph of Dustin Hoffman in Los Angeles Magazine violated his rights of publicity and accordingly awarded both compensatory and punitive damages. On appeal, Los Angeles Magazine argued that its use of the photo was protected under the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's judgment. The photograph was not pure commercial speech. It was not used in a traditional advertisement printed merely for the purpose of selling a product. Viewed in context, the article, in which the photo appeared, as a whole was a combination of fashion photography, humor, and visual and verbal editorial comment on classic films and famous actors. Any commercial aspects were inextricably entwined with expressive elements, and so they could not be separated out from the fully protected whole. Further, Dustin Hoffman did not demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that Los Angeles Magazine intended to create a false impression in the minds of its readers that when they saw the photo, they were seeing plaintiff's body. All but one of the references to the relevant article made it clear that digital techniques were used to substitute current fashions for the clothes worn in the original stills. New York Times Company, Inc. v. Tasini, 121 S.Ct. 2381 (2001) The New York Times, print and electronic publishers, challenged the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that they infringed on the copyrights of respondent freelance authors by placing authors' articles in electronic databases available through the Internet. The Times asserted it was protected by the reproduction and distribution privilege accorded collective work copyright owners by 17 U.S.C.S. §§ 201(c). The Supreme Court, however, disagreed and upheld the decision of the Second Circuit. It held that the databases reproduced and distributed articles standing alone and not in context, not as part of the collective work to which the author contributed, or as part of any revision thereof, or as part of any later collective work in the same series under §§ 201(c). The authors had registered the copyrights for each article, while the print publishers registered collective work copyrights in each periodical edition in which an article originally appeared. The electronic publishers' databases did not reproduce and distribute the articles as part of either the original edition or a revision of that edition. An article's mark of origin did not mean the article was reproduced or distributed as part of the periodical. Unlike microforms, the databases did not reproduce articles as part of the collective work or as part of any revision. Media neutrality protected authors' rights to the extent the articles were presented individually within the databases. The storage and retrieval systems effectively overrode authors' exclusive rights. The electronic publishers were not selling equipment; they sold copies of the articles.