Magistrate Judge Peck
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PEARSON Education Inc. copyrights U.S. Copyright Registrations to 130 textbooks. Co-plaintiff Cengage Learning Inc. does so with 57 books. Defendant allegedly infringed plaintiffs’ copyrights by selling—absent plaintiffs’ permission—”electronic copies of instructor’s solutions manuals” providing answers to questions posed in the copyrighted textbooks. The solution manuals bought from defendant were identical to the manuals plaintiffs’ publish and sell. The magistrate judge recommended that plaintiffs be granted summary judgment and that Pearson and Cengage be awarded $97,500 and $42,750 in statutory damages, respectively, under 17 USC §504(c)(1), comprising $750 for each of the 187 textbooks infringed. In so doing, the magistrate judge agreed with plaintiffs’ assertion that the solution manuals sold by defendant qualified as “derivative works” under the Copyright Act. As in Pavlica v. Behr and Addison-Wesley Publ’g Co. v. Brown, defendant’s manuals complemented plaintiffs’ 187 copyrighted textbooks, had no “independent economic value” and were “meaningless’ without the textbooks because they merely provided answers to questions posed in the textbooks.
