Mayers v. Racino
- Vyskocil
- 1:23-cv-05183
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 9
In Mayers v. Racino, Judge Vyskocil dismissed the copyright claim with prejudice, dismissed state claims without prejudice, and granted defendants’ motion.
Keston J. Mayers’s copyright, libel, and breach-of-privacy claims were dismissed. The copyright claim was dismissed with prejudice; the state-law claims were dismissed without prejudice to renewal in state court. Brad Racino and the media-company defendants obtained dismissal of the Second Amended Complaint.
What happened
In Mayers v. Racino, Keston J. Mayers sued Brad Racino and several media companies over an article and photographs. He claimed copyright infringement, libel, and privacy violations, and said the article used his photographs and personal information without permission.
The court held that Mayers filed the copyright lawsuit before registering the photographs. His later registration and amended complaint could not fix that problem, so the copyright claim was dismissed with prejudice. The court declined to hear the related New York claims and dismissed them without prejudice to bringing them in state court.
Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint and denied their request for oral argument. The court directed the clerk to close the case.
The detailed version
- Mayers v. Racino · No. 1:23-cv-05183
- Vyskocil
- Aug. 7, 2024
Background
Keston J. Mayers, representing himself, sued reporter Brad Racino and Syracuse.com, NYup.com, NY Cannabis Insider, Advance Media New York, and Advance Local Media. The lawsuit concerned an article about Mayers’s efforts to obtain expungement of a criminal charge so he could qualify for a conditional retail marijuana license under New York’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act.
Mayers alleged that he agreed to be interviewed about his effort to vacate his prior cannabis conviction, but that the published article instead focused on details of his prior arrest and private health information. The article also included two photographs of Mayers with his mother. Mayers alleged that the photographs were his copyrighted works and that he had not given written consent for their use. He asserted copyright infringement under the Copyright Act and New York claims for libel and breach of privacy.
The defendants moved under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), which allows dismissal when a complaint does not adequately state a legal claim. Before filing his Second Amended Complaint, Mayers obtained copyright registrations for the photographs. He acknowledged, however, that he had not registered them until almost four months after filing the lawsuit.
Copyright Claim
The court applied Section 411(a) of the Copyright Act, which requires a copyright owner to obtain registration or preregistration before filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit involving a United States work. The court explained that registration is a requirement that must be completed before suit is filed, even though copyright rights exist independently of registration.
Because Mayers had not applied for registration or received the Copyright Office’s decision before starting the lawsuit, the court held that his copyright claim was fatally defective. His later registration and amended complaint could not cure the defect. The court therefore dismissed the copyright-infringement claim with prejudice.
State Law Claims
The court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction, meaning authority to hear related state-law claims in the same federal case, after dismissing the federal copyright claim. It dismissed Mayers’s New York libel and breach-of-privacy claims without prejudice to renewal in state court.
Disposition
Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint. The court separately denied the defendants’ motion for oral argument, directed the clerk to terminate the relevant docket entries, and closed the case.
Read the full 9-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.