On November 13, 1998, this Court granted defendant's motion for summary judgment dismissing plaintiff's copyright infringement claim on the alternative grounds that the allegedly infringed works -- color transparencies of paintings which themselves are in the public domain -- were not original and therefore not permissible subjects of valid copyright and, in any case, were not infringed.It applied United Kingdom law in determining whether plaintiff's transparencies were copyrightable. The Court noted, however, that it would have reached the same result under United States law.

Following the entry of final judgment, the Court was bombarded with additional submissions. On November 23, 1998, plaintiff moved for reargument and reconsideration, arguing that the Court erred on the issue of originality. It asserted that the Court had ignored the Register of Copyright's issuance of a certificate of registration for one of plaintiff's transparencies, which it takes as establishing copyrightability, and that the Court had misconstrued British copyright law in that it failed to follow Graves' Case, which was decided in the Court of Queens Bench in 1869. At about the same time, the Court received an unsolicited letter from Professor William Patry, author of a copyright law treatise, which argued that the Court erred in applying the law of the United Kingdom to the issue of copyrightability. Plaintiff then moved for an order permitting the filing of an amicus brief by one of its associates, The Wallace Collection, to address the United Kingdom law issue. The Court granted leave for the submission of the amicus brief and invited the parties to respond to Professor Patry's letter. The matter now is ripe for decision.

At the outset, it is worth noting that the post-judgment flurry was occasioned chiefly by the fact that the plaintiff failed competently to address most of the issues raised by this interesting case prior to the entry of final judgment. In particular, while plaintiff urged the application of U.K. law, it made no serious effort to address the choice of law issue and no effort at all (apart from citing the British copyright act) to bring pertinent U.K. authority to the Court's attention before plaintiff lost the case. Indeed, it did not even cite Graves' Case, the supposedly controlling authority that the Court is said to have overlooked.

Everything plaintiff has submitted on this motion should have been before the Court earlier, which is more than sufficient reason to deny its motion as an unwarranted imposition on the Court and, indeed, its adversary.