Motivational Speaker Loses Copyright Lawsuit Against High School
From last week’s decision by Fifth Circuit Judge Gregg Costa (joined by Judges Carolyn Dineen King and Don Willett) in Bell v. Eagle Mountain Saginaw Indep. School Dist.:
The softball team and flag corps at a public high school outside Fort Worth used their Twitter accounts to post a motivational passage [230 words, or one page from a 72-page book -EV] from sports psychologist Keith Bell’s book, Winning Isn’t Normal.
We do not know if the tweets motivated the students to perform at a higher level. We do know that the tweets resulted in Bell’s suing the school district for copyright infringement. We must decide if the tweets were a fair use of the copyright that bars this suit.
Apparently the author, Dr. Keith Bell, had filed “over 25 copyright lawsuits” “[b]etween 2006 and 2017” over “unauthorized uses of [this] passage,” mostly against “public schools or nonprofits, which published the WIN Passage on social media.” But this time he lost:
[T]he sc
Article from Reason.com
