The Supreme Court will be way more interested in the procedural issue then the copyright issue. That one is the true doozy. If the current ruling stands in thr 10th circuit you are going to have to make an affirmative defense along with also pointing out no claims have been made which require a defense at all.
That's big problem jimbo. Gonna take a big wrench to fix.
If the panel affirms on alternate grounds they might not even get to the procedural issue. I think they probably have to because letting that stand is ridiculous, though, even if they do affirm.
The whole point of an affirmative defense is it's something the defendant has to prove by evidence. You're not allowed to introduce extrinsic evidence in a motion to dismiss (and HAVE NOT HAD DISCOVERY AT THE TIME YOU DO), and doing so results in the trial court converting it to a Motion for Summary Judgment under FRCP 56.
The ruling is essentially you can't file a motion to dismiss in a copyright case without forever waiving a fair use defense at trial or involuntarily having it converted into a pre-discovery Rule 56 motion.
That's derange-o and really, for a Tenth Circuit panel to fuck that up is embarrassing. It's 1L shit.
They all have clerks who just passed the bar where you have to answer all kinds of shit like that.
Now that doesn't mean you'd
never raise a fair use defense in a motion to dismiss, but it would almost never be granted unless on the face of the complaint, it's clearly fair use even by the plaintiff's own claims. It really isn't in this case and there would have been no sane reason to argue, on behalf of a pseudonymous third party, a lengthy fair use argument that is likely unavailing anyway.
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This is 2007-present.
The 10th circuit isn’t the 9th, but in general it seems like the appeals courts are a joke
SCOTUS doesn't take up an appeal unless four of the Justices agree to it, and if the side of the case they're on isn't likely to win, a minority isn't going to go for it in most cases. So in every one of these cases, at least four and possibly five of the Justices agree there's something to appeal there.
Also in the Ninth Circuit's defense, although it is indeed the most fucked-up circuit, they also hear a lot more cases, a lot more appeals are going to be taken from it, and SCOTUS and the Ninth are always at loggerheads.