Leigh v. Warner Brothers concerns a claim of copyright infringement brought by a photographer against a movie studio. In 1993, Jack Leigh photographed Bird Girl, a sculpture in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetary, for the cover of John Berendt’s 1994 book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. To promote their 1997 film version of the book, Warner Brothers commissioned photographs of a replica of the statue. Leigh argued that the resulting images infringed on his copyright due to their “substantial similarity” to his original image. The district court dismissed Leigh’s claim, holding that no reasonable jury could find that the images were substantially similar. The 11th Circuit disagreed and reversed this decision, remanding Leigh’s claim for further consideration of the images’ marked similarities.

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