Some things in life are just unusual, and being a landlord is often the gateway to witnessing a lot of that. A surprising source of compensation for a trashed house might be damages for copyright infringement.
Basset v. Jensen et al is a case in which the plaintiff, Leah Bassett, rented her custom-decorated residence to an individual. She later found out that the renter was an employee of, and front for, a commercial movie maker, who used her premises to make pornographic films.
The complaint first reads as a bad landlord/tenant dispute in which the landlord received notice that the woman who had rented the place sublet it to other people, who trashed it and used it to make the unsavory videos. In addition to the unauthorized use of the house for a commercial purpose, defendants broke into a padlocked closet.
Bassett took the house off the rental market and sought psychotherapy, supporting a claim for emotional damages. Most offensive to her — and the door into federal court for an L&T dispute — was that her original artwork had served as background scenery in over a dozen of videos’ raw footage. In her own words, Basset spent “obsessive” amounts of time going through pornographic websites and DVDs to find ones that were filmed in her house.
She went to court with common law claims for $15,000 in damages to the house, and claims for infringing the copyright in her original artwork. In the Eastern District of Massachusetts, the parties filed dueling motions for summary judgment. The judge determined the court needed a demonstration that the use of the artwork wasn’t de minimis, as defendants alleged. Basset was directed to produce a spreadsheet, including screenshots. The court ruled that for each artwork that was depicted for 30 seconds or more, based on Bassett’s index of such instances (and presumably the judge’s review of such footage), Bassett could bring a copyright infringement claim to trial.
Seems reasonable to me that the judge picked “30 seconds” as a rule of thumb to determine potential infringement. Not too long, not too short. This also was a creative use of an artist’s home gallery — particularly of work that she may or may not have ever publicly displayed elsewhere — to use as a means of enforcing her outrage that the place had been trashed and used for pornographic films. The artwork and the films themselves… I leave to your respective imaginations.
Mark S. Kaufman
Kaufman & Kahn
kaufman@kaufmankahn.com
10 Grand Central, 155 East 44th Street
19th Floor
New York, NY 10017
Tel. (212) 293-5556
Fax. (212) 355-5009
