Cite as 323 F.3d 805 (9th Cir. 2003)
Delbert J. Barnard, Barnard & Pauly, Seattle, WA, for the defendants-appellants.
Roger R. Myers and Lisa M. Sitkin, Steinhart & Falconer, San Francisco, CA, for the plaintiffs-appellees.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California; Garland E. Burrell, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-01-00701-GEB.
Before: SILVERMAN and GOULD, Circuit Judges, and WEINER,[* 1] Senior District Judge.
Opinion
Gould, Circuit Judge.
In the Copyright Act, Congress sought to benefit the public by encouraging artists’ creative expression. Congress carefully drew the contours of copyright protection to achieve this goal. It granted artists the exclusive right to the original expression in their works, thereby giving them a financial incentive to create works to enrich our culture.[1] But it denied artists the exclusive right to ideas and standard elements in their works, thereby preventing them from monopolizing what rightfully belongs to the public. In this case, we must locate the faint line between unprotected idea and original expression in the context of realistic animal sculpture. We must decide whether an artist’s lifelike glass-in-glass sculptures of jellyfish are protectable by copyright. Because we conclude that the sculptures are composed of unprotectable ideas and standard elements, and also that the combination of those unprotectable elements is unprotectable, we reverse the judgment of the district court.
I
Plaintiff Richard Satava is a glass artist from California. In the late 1980s, Satava was inspired by the jellyfish display at an aquarium. He began experimenting with jellyfish sculptures in the glass-in-glass medium and, in 1990, began selling glass-in-glass jellyfish sculptures. The sculptures sold well, and Satava made more of them. By 2002, Satava was designing and creating about three hundred jellyfish sculptures each month. Satava’s sculptures are sold in galleries and gift shops in forty states, and they sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on size. Satava has registered several of his works with the Register of Copyrights.
Satava describes his sculptures as “vertically oriented, colorful, fanciful jellyfish with tendril-like tentacles and a rounded bell encased in an outer layer of rounded clear glass that is bulbous at the top and tapering toward the bottom to form roughly a bullet shape, with the jellyfish portion of the sculpture filling almost the entire volume of the outer, clearglass shroud.” Satava’s jellyfish appear lifelike. They re-
- ↑ *The Honorable Charles R. Weiner, Senior United States District Judge for Eastern Pennsylvania, sitting by designation.
- ↑ Justice Potter Stewart explained this feature of copyright law: “The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ‘author’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.” Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156, 95 S.Ct. 2040, 45 L.Ed.2d 84 (1975).
