Plaintiff Richard Satava and defendant Christopher Lowry are sculptors who designed and sold jellyfish sculptures using a glass-in-glass medium, a traditional art form in which a glass sculpture is dipped into molten glass, which hardens into a solid outer layer. Satava and Lowry’s sculptures ranged in size and price, but both featured colorful, luminescent glass jellyfish with trailing tentacles oriented vertically and encased in a layer of thick, clear glass. Satava originally conceived of the sculptures in the late 1980s and began selling them in 1990, after which he registered several of his designs with the Copyright Office. Defendant Christopher Lowry began selling his jellyfish sculptures in the 1990s and admitted to coming across Satava’s designs in magazines and in person between 1996 and 1997. The appellate court noted that the two sculptors’ work resembled each other to the extent that Lowry’s sculptures were often mistaken for Satava’s.

The similarity between the two sculpture designs prompted the district court to grant a preliminary injunction against Lowry, forbidding him from producing sculptures that resembled Satava’s. On review, the appellate court reversed, holding that the district court had applied an erroneous legal standard to reach its conclusion. Satava’s sculptures, the appellate court explained, did not warrant copyright protection because they were composed of “several unprotectable ideas and standard elements”—jellyfish physiology as well as standard glass-in-glass sculptural elements—that are in the public domain.

While the appellate court recognized that combinations of unprotectable elements could qualify for copyright protection, it concluded that Satava’s designs lacked the originality necessary for this protection. The appellate court tempered its reversal by acknowledging that Satava could claim copyright in his artistic choices to the extent that [they] were not governed by jellyfish physiology or the glass-in-glass medium. As noted by the appellate court, this acknowledgement is in keeping with precedent, which has recognized a thin copyright in the realistic depiction of animals. See Dyer v. Napier.