Bloomberg Law
July 19, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

Did Melania Trump Infringe 2008 Obama Speech?

Bloomberg Law - Staff Reports

By Anandashankar Mazumdar, Bloomberg BNA

Amid the debate raging over whether some of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech was cribbed from a 2008 Michelle Obama address, there’s an overlooked legal question: whether there wasn’t just copying, but copyright infringement.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump’s campaign has denied any intentional plagiarism by Melania Trump, according to Bloomberg News. Aside from the plagiarism allegations, though, is the infringement question — and that’s a much tougher one to answer, legal experts say.

“It is almost certainly plagiarism,” Mark A. Lemley, a law professor at Leland Stanford Jr. University and an intellectual property ...

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