Saul Steinberg was a cartoonist famous for his 1976 New Yorker cover representing “a parochial New Yorker’s view of the world.” Steinberg’s illustration shows a detailed bird’s eye view of the West Side of Manhattan and a telescoped perspective looking westward across the Hudson River of the rest of the world. Nearly a decade later, Columbia Pictures created a poster for the film Moscow on the Hudson, which they admitted was based on Steinberg’s image. The poster showed a detailed bird’s eye view of the East Side of Manhattan and a telescoped perspective looking Eastward across the East River of the rest of the world. Steinberg brought a copyright infringement suit against the film’s “producers, promoters, distributors, and advertisers,” including newspapers that published the advertisements (collectively, the “Columbia Pictures defendants”) and both parties moved for summary judgment.

The core issue was whether the two works were substantially similar enough to constitute an infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright. To measure this similarity, the district court considered whether an average lay observer would recognize the alleged copy as having been appropriated from the copyrighted work. In its examination, the district court distinguished the idea behind Steinberg’s illustration (“a map of the world from an egocentrically myopic perspective”), which is not protectable, from its specific protectable elements (e.g. the bird’s eye perspective down a two-way street, the four-block grid of buildings, and even particular depictions of certain buildings, as well as Steinberg’s “sketchy, whimsical style”). The district court noted that on “first glance” the “striking stylistic relationship” is evident and such similarities are consequential because style is one ingredient of ‘expression.’

The district court compared Steinberg’s illustration and Columbia Pictures’ poster, noting that “while not all of the details are identical, many of them could be mistaken for one another.” In particular, the district court highlighted the Moscow poster’s buildings, which recreate “the ornaments, facades, and details of Steinberg’s buildings.” Because these buildings were a pastiche drawn from Steinberg’s imagination and not from life, the district court concluded “the similarity . . . cannot be explained by an assertion that the artists happened to choose the same buildings to draw.” The district court reached a similar conclusion regarding the print, finding that “the Columbia artist's use of the childlike, spiky block print that has become one of Steinberg's hallmarks to letter the names of the streets in the “Moscow” poster can be explained only as copying.”

In response to the Columbia Pictures defendants’ contention that the works were not wholly similar, the district court emphasized that ‘substantial similarity’ does not require the works to be identical, and that a copyright infringement action can be sustained even if only a small portion of the copyrighted work is at issue. Similarly, the district court rejected the Columbia Pictures defendants’ argument “that any similarities between the works are unprotectable scenes a faire . . . or settings which . . . [are] standard in the treatment of a given topic,” because Steinberg was alleging similarities between the expressions of the setting rather than just the settings. The district court also rejected the Columbia Pictures defendants’ argument that the Moscow poster was a parody of Steinberg’s illustration and therefore fair use, holding that as “an appealing advertisement to promote an unrelated commercial product,” the Moscow poster failed to meet the fair use requirements. The district court thus granted Steinberg’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed the Columbia Pictures defendants’ motion for summary judgment.