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The Supreme Court held 6/2/03 in Dastar that a party who distributes a creative work taken from the public domain does not violate Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act, which prohibits the “false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which . . . is likely to cause confusion . . . as to the origin . . . of [its] goods.” Dastar copied a series of videotapes created by Twentieth Century Fox, labeled the product with a different name, and marketed it without attribution to Fox. The Supreme Court held that Section 43(a) only prohibits a party from misrepresenting the identity of “the producer of the tangible product sold in the marketplace.” “The consumer who buys a branded product does not automatically assume that the brand-name company is the same entity that came up with the idea for the product, or designed the product – and typically does not care whether it is. The words of the Lanham Act should not be stretched to cover matters that are typically of no consequence to purchasers.” Here, the tangible product at issue are videotapes that Dastar produced, and the Lanham Act does not prohibit Dastar from distributed these tapes without crediting Fox as the company that originally created the television series. This case is important to all businesses who create or distribute works subject to the Lanham Act’s provisions.