Copyright Law Writing Assignments – Spring 2026

• Syllabus and readings (home page)
• Important course information: materials, mechanics, policies, and grading
• Writing assignments and related instructions
• Open Educational Resources (OER) copyright and permissions information

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS: BASIC REQUIREMENTS AND MECHANICS

The graded work for this course consists of three short (3-4 pp.) writing assignments. These may consist of legal memoranda (to colleagues, clients, or others); explanatory email messages (again, to one or more audiences); or PowerPoint [or equivalent] slide decks (in which the lawyer communicates by the content of the slide deck, not by delivering a presentation orally). Each assignment will be posted here approximately two weeks before the assignment is due. Also before the assignment is due, time in class will be set aside to discuss questions relating to each assignment.

FORMAT EXPECTATIONS

Prior versions of this course have required that writing assignments be produced in solely in the format of traditional legal memos. That expectation has changed, because lawyers today increasingly communicate in other formats and other media. This course may require different formats.

HOW TO SUCCEED

Although the formats may change, professional expectations regarding effective communication have not changed. Legal writing in every setting should be clear, consistent, polished, expert, ethical, responsive, and trustworthy. Those expectations apply to this course. For guidance regarding those expectations and how they apply to the graded work for this course, students are strongly encouraged to read and re-read this “Modern Legal Writing” document, which summarizes advice for producing a great work product in Professor Madison’s courses.

For help with basic writing questions (grammar, syntax, word choice, active vs. passive voice, and so on), consider trying editing / writing correction / grammar checking software. A good choice – with a free option – is Grammarly. An alternative choice that may be better suited to professional writing but one that costs real money, is WordRake. WordRake may be a useful investment now that pays off over a full professional career. The founder and creator of WordRake, Gary Kinder, is a tremendous writer in his own right. Professor Madison took a writing seminar from Kinder as a junior lawyer and still remembers and uses his lessons today.

RUBRIC

The rubric used to mark the assignments is available here.

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS DUE DATES

• Assignment 1:  Friday, February 20, 2026, at 3 pm.
• Assignment 2:  Friday, April 3, 2026, at 3 pm.
• Assignment 3:  Last day of exams (Wednesday, May 6, 2026), at 12 noon.

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

For students who want to know more about the assignments for this course, here is a page containing the text of some prior assignments.

ASSIGNMENTS

[Each assignment will be posted here approximately 2 weeks before it is due.]

Assignment Three

To:        Students in Professor Madison’s Copyright Law course
From:   Professor Madison
Re:       Secondary liability
Date: April 10, 2026

This assignment comes to you as lawyers-in-training rather than as lawyers-imagining-themselves-as-practitioners. It asks you to dive deeply into a cutting-edge question of copyright doctrine.

The background:

Most law students are introduced to the idea and the existence of the “Restatements of the Law” in first-year courses in Contracts and Torts.  The Restatements are law reform projects undertaken by a century-old private organization of senior lawyers, veteran law professors, and judges called the American Law Institute, or ALI. Each Restatement is intended to document the state of a selected area of law, usually but not always an area that has developed over time across numerous judicial decisions. Each Restatement is the product of years of collaboration and deliberation by experts in the relevant field and by the ALI as a whole.

Each Restatement represents an attempt to “restate” the law as it is, on something approaching a “consensus” basis, rather than to predict or recommend changes to the law, as a law review article often tries to do. (Inevitably, occasionally the line between “the law is it is” and “the law as it is likely to be, based on principles,” gets a little blurry.) It consists of a series of rules or principles, known as the “black letter” (the text of the rules and principles are printed in the Restatements in bold, black type). Each “black letter” statement is accompanied by Comments and Notes by the Reporters of the Restatement (the experts leading the Restatement project) that describe the key sources and nuances of the black letter, as represented in the cases.

The Restatements are not law itself. Nor are they simply treatises “about” the law. Instead, the Restatements are designed explicitly as aids for judges and lawyers, in synthesizing and documenting judgments and holdings from many jurisdictions.  For example, a judge in a given jurisdiction may want to cite and rely on “the law” of a certain matter, but the decisional law in that jurisdiction may be thin or even nonexistent. The judge might look to the Restatement for guidance as to what the law “is” in general, so that the judge might chose to adopt that principle in the new instance. In many cases, as with contract law and torts, the Restatements have been adopted and relied explicitly on by courts.  Even where that has not happened, the Restatements have come to be viewed by many courts and practitioners as enormously helpful and by many courts as something close to authoritative. The ALI is viewed generally as one of the most respected bodies of legal experts and expertise in the world.

A little more than a decade ago, the ALI agreed to undertake a “Restatement of Copyright.” That project is now nearing completion; the final text of this Restatement has been approved by the ALI, although the final document has not yet been formally published.

After that final approval but before publication, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its opinion in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, on the issue of secondary liability in copyright.

This assignment asks you to review the text of the Restatement’s sections on secondary liability, in light of the new Cox opinion. 

You have two questions to answer: 

Question One:  what changes to those texts do you recommend, if any? Be specific, on a word-by-word and/or line-by-line and/or sentence-by-sentence basis, as you think wise.

Question Two:  explain the reasoning that justifies your response to Question One, in some detail.

Here is the relevant text of the draft “black letter” Restatement of Copyright at present.

I have made minor typographical changes for clarity.

One:  Secondary Liability for Copyright Infringement

A defendant may be held secondarily liable for another party’s direct act of copyright infringement on the basis of contributory infringement, and/or on the basis of vicarious liability, under the rules stated below.

Two:  Contributory Copyright Infringement

To establish a defendant’s liability for contributory copyright infringement, a plaintiff must demonstrate:

(a) that a third party directly infringed the plaintiff’s copyright; and

(b) that either

(1) the defendant

(A) knew or should have known of, or was willfully blind to, one or more acts, committed by the third party, that directly infringed the plaintiff’s copyright, and

(B) caused or materially contributed to the directly infringing act or acts, or

(2) the defendant intentionally induced one or more acts by the third party that directly infringed the plaintiff’s copyright, by communicating a clear message designed to encourage others to commit infringements or by taking other active steps with the purpose of bringing about infringing acts.

Three:  Vicarious Liability for Copyright Infringement

To establish that a defendant is vicariously liable for another’s act of copyright infringement, a plaintiff must demonstrate that:

(a) a third party directly infringed the plaintiff’s copyright; and

(b) the defendant

(1) had the right and ability to supervise or control the third party’s directly infringing activity, and

(2) had an obvious and direct financial interest in, or received a financial benefit directly attributable to, that third party’s infringing activity.

Observations that may be relevant to you:

The drafters’ Comments and Notes on these sections make it clear that these sections are based on the following key principles and precedents:

The concept of secondary liability in copyright is permitted by statute under the phrase “to authorize” in Section 106 of the Copyright Act. Before the enactment of the Copyright Act in 1976, secondary liability in copyright had developed by common-law courts in copyright cases, in a style analogous to the style used by common-law courts for fair use, before the Copyright Act took effect. The legislative history of the 1976 Act suggests that the phrase “to authorize” was included as an acknowledgement of the role of common-law decisionmaking in the development of the doctrine.

Key modern appellate cases as to both contributory and vicarious liability and as to the concept of secondary liability generally include A&M Records v. Napster, Inc. and Fonovisa, Inc. v. Cherry Auction, Inc. A key district court opinion is Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc. The salient, significant Supreme Court opinion is, of course, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.  The Court in Grokster explored at length its prior opinion in Sony Corp. v. University City Studios, Inc.

Each of the cases cited in this assignment is available in edited form on the course website. The Napster opinion that appears on the course website has been supplemented with the court’s discussion of secondary liability. The Sony opinion has been added to the list of Optional Materials.

Rules and Guidelines for Assignment Three

To the extent that these rules may appear to conflict with general advice regarding work product that appears in course-related webpages, these rules take precedence.

This is an “open” problem, meaning that there are no limits on the resources that you may bring to bear on your work. Among other things, you may consult with your classmates and other human beings. If you discuss the merits of the assignment with anyone, however, you must disclose that person’s identity on or in your work product. Write the names of any of these “consultants” at the top of the first page of the document.

Use your own name in the “From” field. Your work product is not anonymous.

Format

Your work product in response to this assignment should be formatted in one of two ways: (i) as an email rather than as a default or standard “legal research memo.” Your email should consist of not more than 1,500 words, excluding the header (To, From, Subject line, Date). In printed form, it should have 1″ minimum margins on all sides. OR (ii) as a set of PowerPoint slides, prepared for delivery as a printed work product, rather than as a guide or accompaniment to an oral presentation. Including a title slide, the total PowerPoint “slide deck” should consist of no more than 20 slides. For guidance and suggestions regarding how to prepare professional PowerPoint slides, review these examples.

You do not need to include a comprehensive statement of the facts; instead, you may refer to the factual background in my memo to you. A factual summary may be helpful, however, in framing and presenting your analysis. No footnotes are permitted.

You may use any font that you wish, but of course take care that all aspects of your work product should look, as well as be, professional.

So that your work product can be graded electronically, you must use Microsoft WORD (in the case of option (i)) or Microsoft PowerPoint (in the case of option (ii)).

Grading

Work product will be graded based on form, format, and writing quality as well as on content. The assignments are designed so as not to have any single correct or even best solution. Each problem may present a range of issues that your work should identify, analyze, and solve in a creative way.

Due date

One copy of the work product prepared for this assignment must be turned in not later than Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 12 NOON.

Your work product must be turned in as an attachment, in MS Word or MS PowerPoint format, to an email to Professor Madison.

There were be no extensions or exceptions to the deadline. Work product that does not conform to the format instructions above, or that is turned in late, will be accepted but is subject to grade reduction.

Assignment Two

To:        Junior Lawyer, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
From:   Senior Lawyer, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
Re:       Script review – “The Neutral Man”
Date: March 20, 2026

The Hollywood studio “Engulf and Devour” has asked our firm to review a draft screenplay for a proposed motion picture.  I need you to review the materials that they have sent over and prepare a copyright analysis.  The studio wants to know what sorts of risks might be involved in making this picture.

Here is what I know:

The pitch that the studio received, or what the industry sometimes calls the “logline,” is this:

“A man who fled the war to stay neutral now presides over the most dangerous room in North Africa—a dim, smoke-choked bar where spies trade secrets and refugees barter for freedom—until the woman he once loved walks in with a hunted resistance leader, forcing him to choose between the safety he sells and the courage he abandoned.”

You are enough of a film buff to recognize that summary either as a remake of the movie Casablanca, or as a homage to Casablanca, or as something that is inspired by Casablanca, or as the starting point of a film that sort of sounds like Casablanca but that might go in a different direction, in large or small ways.

(If you’re not the film buff that I think you are, remember that Casablanca, released in 1942, is widely regarded as one of the greatest American movies ever made. The U.S. copyright in the film and its screenplay are owned by Turner Entertainment. In the past, multiple efforts to develop sequels to Casablanca, remakes of Casablanca, and TV adaptations of Casablanca have been mounted. None of them has succeeded commercially; most of them were never produced despite early efforts to secure rights and financing. The highest profile version is the motion picture Havana (1990), which starred two major stars – Robert Redford and Lena Olin. The word around Hollywood has always been that the original film is simply too iconic to produce again. We have not been engaged to offer advice on the commercial prospects for the new film; we have only been asked about copyright.)

In addition to the logline, the studio sent over the draft screenplay that’s been developed so far. That is attached to this memo.

I need you to go through the screenplay and review Casablanca and produce a detailed comparison of the two properties from a copyright point of view.  If you conclude that aspects of the new screenplay should be changed in order to reduce the risk of a claim of infringement by Turner, you should describe what those are and why you believe that a credible copyright problem exists, but it isn’t necessary to doctor the screenplay yourself. The studio’s writers will look into the details of any needed changes.

I need your work by 3 pm on Friday, April 3, 2026.

Rules and Guidelines for Assignment Two

To the extent that these rules may appear to conflict with general advice regarding work product that appears in course-related webpages, these rules take precedence.

This is an “open” problem, meaning that there are no limits on the resources that you may bring to bear on your work. Among other things, you may consult with your classmates and other human beings. If you discuss the merits of the assignment with anyone, however, you must disclose that person’s identity on or in your work product. Write the names of any of these “consultants” at the top of the first page of the document.

Use your own name in the “From” field. Your work product is not anonymous.

Material to Consult (written in the voice of Professor Madison, rather than in the voice of the Senior Partner)

The draft screenplay, so far, is here. The title – “The Neutral Man” – is a placeholder. Titles can always be changed.

There are multiple ways to see and learn about the movie Casablanca.

YouTube hosts Casablanca here for $5.99. (The picture may also be available via HBO Max, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.)  Pirate sites host free copies online; they are easy to find via a general purpose search engine.

A modern trailer for Casablanca is available here.  The original trailer is available here.

The complete screenplay for Casablanca is available here. A complete (and authorized) reading of the screenplay is available here.

There are numerous summaries of the film online and in print.  A few of the better ones include:

• Rogerebert.com
• IMDB
• Wikipedia
• The two best books about Casablanca are Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (2017) and Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (2002) (an earlier edition was published in 1992 as Round Up the Usual Suspects).
• Umberto Eco, the legendary Italian cultural critic and author, wrote the most influential and widely-cited and discussed (short) essay summarizing and examining Casablanca, titled “The Clichés are Having a Ball” (1994).

My own contribution to the glut of Casablanca-themed literature, which includes both the above works about Casablanca and work that uses Casablanca for other purposes (hint, hint: parody) (Bugs Bunny) (Sesame Street) (Saturday Night Live) (the 2026 Oscars ceremony), was published in 2004 as a law review article titled “The Narratives of Cyberspace Law (or, Learning From Casablanca).” The article includes a summary of the plot of the picture, at pages 259 to 271, interspersed with commentary on Casablanca’s modern relevance.

(During the class Q&A, I speculated that Casablanca and Star Wars might share a plot and other attributes. As I suspected (aloud!), I am not the only person to think so. Here is an entertaining YouTube video that makes the same point.)

A Note on How The Materials for This Assignment Came Together

This is in the voice of Professor Madison, but students may find this information useful in crafting their analyses. To create this assignment, I used Generative AI.

I prompted the public version of ChatGPT with the text: “Write me a logline for a movie about an American expatriate who runs a bar in a neutral country in North Africa during World War II.” Reading the response, I added – using references that are common in the screenwriting trade – “Edit the logline so that it contains irony and a compelling mental picture.” That combination gave me the logline included in the assignment, above.

I copied the logline into the free side of Nolan, a screenwriting AI, and asked it to generate a screenplay. That’s the PDF that I have linked to above. The watermark in the PDF is an adaptation of Nolan’s URL: finalbitai.com.

I was inspired to produce the assignment by the opinion published four days ago by Judge Colleen McMahon in Freeman v. Deebs-Elkenaney, a copyright infringement case involving books in the “romantasy” genre. The opinion is 157 double-spaced pages long, and it chronicles Judge McMahon’s personal journey through 3,000 pages of fiction. Judge McMahon was following a well-established practice in copyright infringement cases, dating at least to Judge Learned Hand’s opinion in Nichols.

Judges are not the only legal professionals who work through questions of similarity and identity in copyright. Practicing lawyers earn a lot of money by living “in the weeds” of these questions long before “cultural artifacts” are produced.

Format

Your work product in response to this assignment should be formatted as an email rather than as a default or standard “legal research memo.” It must be typed or printed using a computer. Your email should consist of not more than 1,500 words, excluding the header (To, From, Subject line, Date) and information about humans and any computer services that you consulted. In printed form, it should have 1″ minimum margins on all sides. For the content, be guided by the advice in the “Modern Legal Writing” document cited above.

Please note that the word limit for this assignment has been increased from the standard 1,200 words to the new 1,500 words.

You do not need to include a comprehensive statement of the facts; instead, you may refer to the factual background in my memo to you. Omitting a factual summary may be unwise nevertheless. A factual summary may be helpful in framing and presenting the analysis of the memo.

No footnotes are permitted.

Any font may be used, so long as it communicates a professional appearance.

So that the memos can be graded electronically, you must use Microsoft WORD for the final, submitted version of the memo.

Grading

Work product will be graded based on form, format, and writing quality as well as on content. The assignments are designed so as not to have any single correct or even best solution. Each problem may present a range of issues that your work should identify, analyze, and solve in a creative way.

Due date

One copy of the work product prepared for this assignment must be turned in not later than Friday, April 3, 2026, at 3 pm.

Your work product must be turned in as an attachment, in MS Word format, to an email to Professor Madison.

There were be no extensions or exceptions to the deadline. Work product that does not conform to the format instructions above, or that is turned in late, will be accepted but is subject to grade reduction.

Assignment One

To:        Junior Lawyer, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
From:   Senior Lawyer, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
Re:       Rodney and Rogers matter
Date: February 5, 2026

We have an interesting new problem for a pro bono client, involving one of Pittsburgh’s most beloved characters.  We’ve been asked to analyze a fair use issue.

Here are the facts of the matter, as I understand them:

Our client is a nonprofit organization called the Complete Record and Archive of Pop. They “rock,” if they say so themselves.  Because the formal name produces an unfortunate acronym, the organization refers to itself as “Pop Rocks,” or “PR,” for short.

Among their heroes of popular culture is Fred Rogers, the late Pittsburgher and legendary creator and star of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” television programming for children that played on public television for decades and that endeared “Mr. Rogers” to generations of Americans. You can find episodes of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” on YouTube, among other places, in case you are not familiar with the program.  In the show, Fred Rogers played a character that was a very close facsimile of his actual persona. On the show and in real life, Fred Rogers was arguably the kindest human being on the planet.

PR is organizing an online exhibit that will focus on Fred Rogers.  PR is not going to host or display episodes from the TV show. Instead, PR’s “take” is to collect and show off Mr. Rogers in popular culture, and specifically in media that “spoofed” Mr. Rogers in one way or another.  For example, the museum will link to YouTube copies of episodes of “Saturday Night Live” from the early 1980s in which a young Eddie Murphy, then an SNL cast member, performed a skit titled ‘Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood.”

The issue for us focuses on a 30-second TV commercial produced and aired in early 1984 by the Burger King company.  The commercial used a character named “Mister Rodney,” obviously (I think) a parody based on Mr. Rogers, to make a comic point about how Burger King hamburgers were better than McDonald’s hamburgers.  I understand from PR that Fred Rogers himself contacted Burger King and asked the company to stop airing the ad, because he was concerned that children would believe that he was endorsing a commercial product. Burger King complied, and after a relatively brief time in circulation, the ad went off the air.

As we all know, media have a way of staying in circulation, even in private ways, and the “Mister Rodney” TV commercial can still be found in odd corners of the Internet.  Which is where PR found it.  Now PR wants to include a copy of the commercial in its exhibit, hosting it and playing it on PR’s website.

As I have told PR so far, it seems to me that doing so raises some concerns about character copyrights and the current state of the law of fair use.  The point of our advice, however, is not really to give aid and comfort to the client directly.  The point of our advice is to offer an opinion about the matter that can be relied on by PR’s insurance carrier.  The exhibit will go forward if the insurance carrier is satisfied that PR has a good faith, defensible argument that its copying and displaying the commercial is fair use, taking into account the recent Goldsmith v. Warhol opinion, among other things.

I need your analysis, including an explanation of additional attributes related to the exhibit that might be investigated, developed, or modified and that would, if implemented, affect your reasoning, no later than Friday, February 20, 2026, at 3 pm.

[Note from Professor Madison: Because you are undoubtedly curious about the commercial in question, I have uploaded a somewhat blurry copy (all PR has given to me) to Canvas in the “Files” section of the Canvas page for this course.]

[One more note from Professor Madison: You may wonder about other legal issues that might be raised here, such as a privacy or right of publicity claim that Fred Rogers’s estate might raise. For our purposes, I would like you to focus only on the copyright questions.]

Rules and Guidelines for Assignment One

To the extent that these rules may appear to conflict with general advice regarding work product that appears in course-related webpages, these rules take precedence.

This is an “open” problem, meaning that there are no limits on the resources that you may bring to bear on your work. Among other things, you may consult with your classmates and other human beings. If you discuss the merits of the assignment with anyone, however, you must disclose that person’s identity on or in your work product. Write the names of any of these “consultants” at the top of the first page of the document.

Use your own name in the “From” field. Your work product is not anonymous.

Format

You should use the default or standard “legal research memo” form and format for this assignment. For the content, be guided by the advice in the “Modern Legal Writing” document cited above.

Memos must be typed or printed using a computer. Each memo, including any attachments, must be not longer than four [4] typewritten or printed pages, double-spaced, with 1″ minimum margins on all sides. “To,” “From,” “Re,” and “Date” headings may be single spaced, and the “consultants” list and description of any AI consultation may appear inside the 1″ margin at the top of the first page.

You do not need to include a comprehensive statement of the facts; instead, you may refer to the factual background in my memo to you. Omitting a factual summary may be unwise nevertheless. A factual summary may be helpful in framing and presenting the analysis of the memo.

No footnotes are permitted.

The following font must be used: Twelve [12] point Times New Roman.

So that the memos can be graded electronically, you must use Microsoft WORD for the final, submitted version of the memo. [Clarified: Your submission must use a .doc or .docx file extension that is readable in MS WORD. Many computer programs in addition to WORD permit saving text in .doc and .docx formats.]

Grading

Work product will be graded based on form, format, and writing quality as well as on content. The assignments are designed so as not to have any single correct or even best solution. Each problem may present a range of issues that your work should identify, analyze, and solve in a creative way.

Due date

One copy of the work product prepared for this assignment must be turned in not later than Friday, February 20, 2026, at 3 pm.

Your work product must be turned in to me (Professor Madison) as an attachment to an email message.

There were be no extensions or exceptions to the deadline. Work product that does not conform to the format instructions above, or that is turned in late, will be accepted but is subject to grade reduction.

.