Mixing up two of my professional interests and litigation specialties, ERISA and intellectual property, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit just decided a case involving the scope of preemption under the Copyright Act. What’s particularly interesting to me is the  characterization by a dissenting member of the panel about the scope of preemption under that statute as opposed to the scope of preemption under ERISA. The judge explained:

Unlike the few federal statutes which have been found to effect complete preemption (e.g., the governance of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) over all plan-"related" causes of action, see Metro. Life, 481 U.S. at 67; Hotz v. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Mass., Inc., 292 F.3d 57, 59 (1st Cir. 2002)), the Copyright Act does not encompass all claims simply because the parties’ dispute happens to involve a copyrighted work. See Venegas-Hernandez v. Asociacion de Compositores y Editores de Musica Latinoamericana, 424 F.3d 50, 58 (1st Cir. 2005) ("The Copyright Act does not draw into federal court all matters that pertain to copyright."); Royal, 833 F.2d at 2. . . .Unlike ERISA, 29 U.S.C. § 1144(a) (providing that ERISA "shall supersede any and all State laws" to the extent that those laws "relate to any employee benefit plan") (emphasis added), the Copyright Act’s preemption provisions are not even remotely panoptic. The Copyright Act preempts only those "legal and equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright as specified in § 106." 17 U.S.C. § 301(a) (emphasis added). Further, "[n]othing in [the Act] annuls or limits any rights or remedies under the common law or statutes of any State with respect to — . . . activities violating legal or equitable rights that are not the equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright as specified in section 106A with respect to works of visual art." Id. § 301(b)(3) (emphasis added); see Blab T.V. of Mobile, Inc. v. Comcast Cable Commc’ns, Inc., 182 F.3d 851, 857 (11th Cir. 1999) (finding no complete preemption because the federal Cable Act contained language which "preserv[ed] state authority except in areas in which the exercise of this authority would be inconsistent with federal law"); cf. Metro. Life, 481 U.S. at 65-66 (citing — as affirmative evidence of complete preemption — legislative history that "[a]ll such actions in Federal or State courts are to be regarded as arising under the laws of the United States in similar fashion to those brought under section 301 of the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947").

What’s interesting in this comparing and contrasting of the scope of preemption under ERISA and the Copyright Act is the focus on the deliberately broader language of preemption contained in ERISA and the deliberately narrower language of preemption contained in the Copyright Act. Many complain about the expansive scope of ERISA preemption that courts have applied, but as the dissenting judge’s analysis here of preemption under the Copyright Act reflects, there is a sound statutory basis for imposing broad preemption of state law theories pursuant to ERISA, as Congress can and does expressly declare a statutory scope of preemption to be narrow when that reflects its intent and ERISA doesn’t contain that type of language.

The case is Cambridge Literary Properties v. W. Goebel Porzellanfabrik G.M.B.H., which you can find right here.