By Chad Sullivan and Chandler Lacy
In an opinion issued on October 26, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held in the Center for Gestalt Development, Inc. v. Charles Bowman and Jean-Marie Robine that the Center for Gestalt Development, Inc. (the “Center”)’s copyright in a collection of unpublished manuscripts by gestalt therapy pioneer Dr. Frederick Perls did not confer copyright ownership in the individual manuscript part of that collection tiled “Psychopathology of Awareness” (the “Manuscript”).
In 2021, the Center sued Charles Bowman (“Bowman”) and Jean-Marie Robine (“Robine”) in federal court, alleging that they infringed its copyright in the previously unpublished forty-page Manuscript by causing a French institute to publish it in a 2020 book devoted primarily to commentary on the Manuscript. The Center based its copyright infringement claim on a 1991 agreement between it and the estate of Dr. Perls’s surviving spouse granting it exclusive rights to publish a collection of Dr. Perls’ unpublished works, which included the Manuscript. By 2020, Bowman and Robine had obtained the permission of Dr. Perls’s heirs to use the Manuscript in the institute’s forthcoming book, and in 2021, the heirs assigned the Manuscript’s copyright to the Center in 2021 for the duration of its litigation against Bowman and Robine.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana granted summary judgment in favor of Bowman and Robine. The District Court concluded that the 1991 agreement between the estate of Dr. Perls’s surviving spouse and the Center granted the latter rights only in the collection of Dr. Perl’s unpublished manuscripts, not any of the underlying articles individually—including the Manuscript. The District Court further found that when the Center was assigned the copyright in the Manuscript from Dr. Perl’s heirs in 2021, those rights were subject to an irrevocable oral license that the heirs had previously granted Bowman and Robine.
The Seventh Circuit affirmed the District Court’s entry of summary judgment in favor of Bowman and Robine. Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Scudder explained that copyright protection for a compilation—a collection of multiple copyrighted writings in a single, unified compendium—is distinct from, and does not automatically extend to, copyright protection for the underlying works under the Copyright Act of 1976. Based on this, the Seventh Circuit verified that the Center’s “copyright in the collection provided no copyright in the [Manuscript] itself” and that Bowman and Robine could not have infringed because they “did not copy the collection as a whole[.]” Moreover, the Seventh Circuit validated that the 2021 assignment by Dr. Pers’s heirs of the Manuscript’s copyright to the Center did not permit them to sue Bowman and Robine for any alleged infringement of the Manuscript because those same heirs had already granted Bowman and Robine an irrevocable oral license to use the Manuscript for the book.
The Seventh Circuit’s decision offers several important reminders for businesses and individuals dealing with intellectual property matters:
- Determining which rights a copyright holder owns—and when the holder owned them—is central to any copyright infringement analysis;
- Ownership of the copyright in an aggregate work does not automatically confer the right to publish any component of that work standing alone;
- A copyright owner may license the use of a copyrighted work in a specified manner; and
- Whether a copyright in a series of unpublished works includes the right of first publication is a separate question from who owns the copyright.
Jackson Kelly attorneys Chad J. Sullivan and Chandler A. Lacy represented Robine both before the District Court and the Seventh Circuit. A copy of the Seventh Circuit’s opinion can be found here.