On March 25, 2014, in Leveyfilm, Inc. v. Fox Sports Interactive Media, LLC, the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied Chicago Tribune Company, LLC's and Tribune Interactive, LLC's (the Tribune) motion to dismiss a claim asserting that the Tribune violated Section 1202 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by removing from a photograph the plaintiff-copyright owner's credit and replacing it with the Tribune's own credit (No. 13 C 4664, (N.D. Ill. Mar. 25, 2014)). Rejecting the Tribune's arguments that the plaintiff's credit did not qualify as copyright management information (CMI) under the DMCA, the court joined recent courts in finding that CMI includes both analog and digital information. It also notably rejected the Tribune's argument that the credit was not protected by the DMCA because it was too remote from the work.

In 1986, shortly before the Chicago Bears won Super Bowl XX, several of the team's players created a rap song and related video titled "Super Bowl Shuffle." The song and video's producer hired Don Levey to take still photographs of the players and used one of the photographs as the cover image for the record album. The album's back cover included, among other credit lines: "Photography: Don Levey, Don Levey Studio."

Leveyfilm alleged that Levey:

In April 2013, Levey discovered that the Tribune had published the album cover photograph on its website. The Tribune did not include the credit line from the back of the 1986 album cover. Instead, it included the credit line "Tribune file photo." Leveyfilm sued the Tribune for copyright infringement and for violating the DMCA's prohibitions against:

The Tribune moved to dismiss the DMCA claim, arguing that the credit line on the back of the album cover could not qualify as protected CMI because:

The court disagreed. It first found that the plain language of Section 1202 does not require CMI to be part of an automated system or connected to digital media or the internet. Similarly, the court found that the statute's plain language does not require an express reference to copyright or copyright ownership for information to qualify as CMI. Noting that the definition of CMI includes the name of a work's author, the court found that the credit line identifying Levey qualified as CMI. The court then rejected the Tribune's third argument. On this point, the court found this case distinguishable from other courts' decisions that:

Here, the court reasoned, it was it implausible that a viewer of an album would not understand that the photo credit on the back cover referred to a photograph on the album's front cover.