reason to quibble with here.[1]
At least one court, relying on MAI Systems in a highly similar factual setting, has made this point explicitly. In Advanced Computer Services of Michigan, Inc. v. MAI Systems Corp., the district court expressly noted that the unlicensed user in that case ran copyrighted diagnostic software "for minutes or longer," but that the program's embodiment in the computer's RAM might be too ephemeral to be fixed if the computer had been shut down "within seconds or fractions of a second" (E.D. Va. 1994). We have no quarrel with this reasoning; it merely makes explicit the reasoning that is implicit in the other MAI Systems cases. Accordingly, those cases provide no support for the conclusion that the definition of "fixed" does not include a duration requirement. See Webster v. Fall, 266 U.S. 507, 511 (1924) ("Questions which merely lurk in the record,
- ↑ The same reasoning also distinguishes this court's opinion in Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co., 158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir. 1998). Language in that opinion, taken out of context, suggests that the definition of "fixed" imposes only an embodiment requirement: "Under § 101's definition of 'copies,' a work satisfies the fixation requirement when it is fixed in a material object from which it can be perceived or communicated directly or with the aid of a machine." Id. at 702. Like the MAI Systems cases, Matthew Bender only addresses the embodiment requirement: specifically, whether West's copyrighted arrangement of judicial opinions was "embedded" in a CD-ROM compilation of opinions when the cases were normally arranged differently but could be manipulated by the user to replicate West's copyrighted arrangement. Id. at 703. The opinion merely quotes the duration language without discussing it, see id. at 702; that case therefore does not compel us to conclude that the definition of "fixed" does not impose a duration requirement.
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