Comedian Jerry Seinfeld just won a big victory in court when an appeals court ruled that he was in the right in a dispute in which someone claimed he did not create his show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee [1]” himself.
Fox News [2] reported that the appeals court sided with Seinfeld against Christian Charles, who directed the pilot episode of the talk show. The appeals court ruled that Charles took too long to file a lawsuit against Seinfeld for allegedly copying his work without compensation, the same ruling that another court had made in September of 2019.
Charles claimed that he first pitched the show to Seinfeld back in 2002, and they worked on it over the years off and on until it premiered online in 2012. Charles alleged that right after the show premiered, he and Seinfeld began arguing about his compensation. He wanted more than the directing fee on a “work-for-hire” basis that Seinfeld offered because he saw himself as a co-creator of the show.
Supreme Court has reportedly ruled that copyright claims must be ruled with three years of infringement, yet Charles waited six years until 2018 to file. In the end, this is what destroyed Charles’ chances of victory, as the Second Circuit court explained in its decision [3] that the case was “time-barred,” which means the clock started ticking on it as soon as the alleged infringement took place.
“The district court identified two events described in the Second Amended Complaint that would have put a reasonably diligent plaintiff on notice that his ownership claims were disputed. First, in February 2012, Seinfeld rejected Charles’s request for backend compensation and made it clear that Charles’s involvement would be limited to a work-for-hire basis,” the complaint read. “Second, the show premiered in July 2012 without crediting Charles, at which point his ownership claim was publicly repudiated.”
The appeals court then concluded that “either one of these developments was enough to place Charles on notice that his ownership claim was disputed and therefore this action, filed six years later, was brought too late.”
This victory could not have come at a better time for Seinfeld, as he is premiering a new hour-long Netflix comedy special this week titled, “Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill.” He will certainly sleep easier knowing that he is out of the woods when it comes to this case!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db_rO4RjqHE
This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com [4] and is used by permission.
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