Cheerleading company can get copyrights, pursue competitors, Supreme Court says

I dunno. SCOTUS reaffirmed the traditional rule, that to be copyrightable the elements need to be separable (as if lifting them off the clothing) and substantial (what you lift off must by itself meet the baseline requirements for copyrightability).

What SCOTUS did do was broaden the scope of the traditional rule by killing a narrow historical exception that would typically have rejected the dress' elements outright, without any serious analysis.

For the most part it's the traditional rule and how its typically applied that keeps the garment industry relatively unencumbered. This decision sucks[1] but I'm skeptical that it's particularly consequential. Their rejection of the Batmobile case last year, which in hindsight presaged this case, was arguably much more consequential.

As an side: any Ginsburg fans out there, know that she's rabidly pro-copyright. Her daughter is a famous and influential copyright scholar and author of an important legal treatise on copyright. Both of them eschew traditional, common law restrictions on copyright in favor of a more modern, abstract, and simplified conceptual approach that would on balance significantly enlarge the scope of copyrightability. Notice that in her concurring opinion in this case, Ginsburg side-stepped the separability condition applied to clothing. Her approach is more likely to induce a monumental shift that could engulf the fashion industry in an epic hell of law suits.

[1] Because brightline exclusions of copyrightability are easier and cheaper to apply by both laymen and judge alike. Even copyright proponents can appreciate how casting aside such well-established exclusions creates tremendous uncertainty and risk for everybody.