In decisions issued six days apart, two panels of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit addressed the scope of copyright protection in instances where ideas and standard elements predominate over individual expression. In both cases, the Ninth Circuit found the works to be only entitled to "thin" protection, and only infringed where the accused work is a virtually identical copy.
The first case, Ets-Hokin v. Skyy Spirits Inc., Case Nos. 01-17411, 02-15126, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 4510 (9th Cir. Mar. 14, 2003), involved commercial advertising photographs of a blue Skyy vodka bottle. The plaintiff-photographer, Ets-Hokin, had claimed Skyy had violated his copyright in a series of photographs he had taken for a Skyy advertising campaign by later using similar photographs shot by another photographer.
