Copyfraud is the use of false copyright claims to control work that does not fall under one's legal control.
The term was drafted by Jason Mazzone, an Associate Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School. Mazzone describes copyfraud as:
Mazzone claims that copyfraud is usually successful because there are few and weak laws that punish the use of false claims in conjunction with the lawful enforcement of the laws and because few people are capable enough to give legal advice about the copyright status of the material in question.
Jurist Paul J. Heald published a paper in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law in 1993 investigating the possibilities to resist payment claims for false copyright claims that could be theoretically resisted by various trade laws:
Heald raised a case in which the first of these theories were successfully used in the context of copyright: Tams-Witmark Music Library v. New Opera Company. An operating company bought the right to perform the The Merry Widow opera for $ 50,000 a year. After just over a year of execution, the company discovered that the work was already in public domain for some years before by a copyright owner's mistake to renew the copyright. The cancellation of royalties, and after being sued by the owner of the expired copyright, resulted in a counter claim for the amount paid to the owner on the basis of a breach of the consideration theory. The court granted the operating company a damages of $ 50,500, and the court of appeal confirmed the verdict, finding that The Merry Widow was in its entirety and forever in the public domain and became available for unrestricted use by all.
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