United States of America v. Dennis Moran

Facts

The defendant is the owner of a “mom-and-pop” movie rental business which rents video cassettes of copyrighted motion pictures to the public. On April 14, 1989, the FBI seized various video cassettes appearing to be six unauthorized copies of copyrighted motion pictures. The parties have agreed that these six motion pictures are validly copyrighted motion pictures, that each of the six motion pictures was distributed to him with the permission of the copyright holder, and that at least one of the movies identified was reproduced by him onto a video cassette, without the authorization of the copyright holder, placed into inventory for rental, and subsequently rented.

The defendant told the FBI agents he put the “duped” copies out for rental and held the “originals” back because he feared the “original” motion pictures would be stolen or damaged. He was charged with violating 17 U.S.C.S. § 506(a).

At trial, it was shown that the defendant has a reputation for honesty among his associates. He testified that he began to “insure” copyrighted video cassettes, meaning that he duplicated copyrighted video cassettes which he had validly purchased from distributors, when he realized copyrighted tapes were being vandalized. He testified he was under the impression that “insuring” tapes was legal whereas “pirating” tapes was not. For practical purposes, he defined “insuring” versus “pirating” as meaning that he could duplicate a copyrighted tape provided he had purchased the copyrighted tape and did not endeavor to rent both the copyrighted tape and the duplicate he had made. There was no persuasive evidence that he made multiple copies of each authorized version of the copyrighted material. There was also no persuasive evidence that he endeavored to rent both the copyrighted tape and the duplicate.