Pryor Cashman has won an appeal before the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The Court upheld the dismissal of a copyright infringement claim brought against Sir Elton John and his longtime songwriting partner Bernie Taupin. The decision affirming Pryor Cashman's victory below was issued by the Court on July 17, 2013.

The plaintiff, Guy Hobbs, a photojournalist and aspiring songwriter, claimed that the lyrics of Elton John’s hit song "Nikita" infringed Hobbs’s lyrics entitled "Natasha," which he claimed to have circulated among music publishers. Hobbs’s lyrics, which were never put to music, were inspired by his doomed cruise ship romance with a Russian waitress. In "Nikita," Elton John sings of his love for a woman he has seen but never met because she is on the other side of the Berlin Wall, where she “look[s] up through the wire” as “[g]uns and gates” “hold [her] in.” Hobbs claimed that "Nikita" copied numerous elements from his lyrics, which featured the theme of “an impossible love affair between a Western man and a Communist woman during the Cold War.”

The U.S. District Court in Chicago had previously granted Pryor Cashman's motion to dismiss the complaint on the grounds that the alleged similarities cited by Hobbs were insufficient to constitute copyright infringement. Hobbs appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

The Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s dismissal, rejecting Hobbs’s argument that "Nikita" had copied a “unique combination” of elements from his unpublished lyrics. 

First, the Court held that elements identified by Hobbs – such as the theme of an impossible Cold War love, references to events that never happened and to written correspondence to or from the beloved woman, and descriptions of the woman’s light eyes – were similar only at the level of general ideas, as opposed to the particular expression of an idea, which is required for a cognizable copyright claim.  The Court stated that “Hobbs cannot rely upon a combination of dissimilar expressions” to support his “unique combination” argument. 

Second, the Court held that other elements cited by Hobbs were standard fare in love songs, and therefore not protectable by copyright. The Court of Appeals concluded that the two sets of lyrics “tell different stories about impossible romances during the Cold War”: Hobbs’s lyrics are about a “brief romantic encounter” on a cruise ship, a “tangible relationship [which] is severed because the woman must sail away,” while Nikita “tells the tale of a man who sees and loves a woman from afar.”

Elton John, Bernie Taupin, and publisher Big Pig Music were represented by Partners Tom J. Ferber and Ilene S. Farkas, both members of Pryor Cashman's Litigation, Intellectual Property and Media & Entertainment Groups. 

The winning appeal has been discussed in articles from Law360 and Variety. To read a sampling of the coverage, please click here.