Judge George B. Daniels
The Executive Secretary of the Commission of the Economic Community of West African States and the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) created the ECOWAS Poverty Profile (EPP). UNSD employee Kamanou was assigned to work on the EPP, whose final version did not credit her work. The court dismissed Kamanou’s copyright infringement suit. Because the EPP was a “work for hire” for the United Nations, she lacked a copyright in the EPP and did not meet an infringement claim’s first element. The court also rejected her claim that exclusion of her name from the EPP was a breach of her moral rights to authorship under Article 6bis of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Under Carell v. Shubert Org. Inc., the Berne Convention does not offer an “independent jurisdictional basis for suit in U.S. federal court.” Kamanou’s claim for tortious interference with contract also failed. Even if her contract with the United Nations provided her a right to internal judicial review of her copyright ownership claim, she failed to plead facts establishing “actual breach of contract” based on interference with such internal judicial review.
