Ryan

ORDER GRANTING SUMMARY ADJUDICATION

INTRODUCTION

Plaintiffs’ motion for summary adjudication requires the Court (1) to decide whether plaintiffs have standing; (2) to determine whether partial summary judgment on the substantive issue should be delayed pending additional discovery; and (3) to construe section 201(c) of the Copyright Act. The Court finds that plaintiffs have standing, sees no reason to delay this decision, and construes section 201(c) in the manner proposed by plaintiffs.

BACKGROUND

The four plaintiffs in this case — Jim Tunney, Arlie Russel Hochshield, Lyn Hejinian, and Ronald Silliman — are authors of articles that were published in magazines and scholarly journals. Each of the articles was copied and delivered, to a third party by defendant UnCover, a document retrieval and delivery business. UnCover 'paid copyright fees to the publishers of the collected works, but not to plaintiffs. Plaintiffs claim that their copyrights in the individual articles were thereby violated.

Defendant UnCover, a partnership owned by defendants CARL Corporation and Dialog Corporation (collectively “UnCover”), is a for-profit company that functions like a private interlibrary…