Copyright case: ACT, Inc. v. Worldwide Interactive Network, USA

Although the company’s description of each individual skill may not have been copyrightable, its selection and arrangement of those skills merited protection.

A federal district court properly found that a table of workplace skills developed for use in a career-readiness assessment program was protectable under the Copyright Act because it reflected creativity in the selection and arrangement of those skills, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has held. The court, affirming the injunction in favor of testing giant ACT against one of its competitors, sidestepped on procedural grounds a potentially novel state sovereignty defense based on the fact that the allegedly infringing materials were provided under contract to a state agency (ACT, Inc. v. Worldwide Interactive Network, August 23, 2022, Readler, C.).

Case date: 23 August 2022

Case number: No. 21-5889

Court: United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit

A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.