A federal court in Colorado denied Kathleen Todd’s claim for copyright infringement and granted defendant’s motion of summary judgment, on the ground that Todd’s jewelry had no copyrightable features.

In 1996, Tood applied for and received a copyright registration for her jewelry crafted from barbed wire. Montana Silversmith’s Inc. came out with their own line of barbed wire jewelry in 2000 and Todd sued for copyright infringement. The court found that while Todd was a skilled artists and her work had a certain “creative gestalt,” and emotional appeal, these things lacked the precision necessary to define them from a legal perspective and was therefore forced to find that her designs did not add anything to the public domain features of the barbed wire.

This entry was posted by Tsan Abrahamson on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Copyrights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.