offensive to the ethics of society": it copied and recorded the Met's opera broadcasts, which interfered with the Met's exclusive recording contract with Columbia Records. (At the time, the Copyright Act did not yet extend to sound recordings.) This was not a "hot news" case but rather an improper copying case. It shows the expansion of the INS doctrine beyond "hot news" to a more general misappropriation doctrine. But the Second Circuit subsequently held that New York law, so interpreted, was preempted by the 1976 Copyright Act. After quoting the foregoing language from Metropolitan Opera, the Second Circuit said: However, we believe that Metropolitan Operas broad misappropriation doctrine based on amorphous concepts such as "commercial immorality" or society's "ethics" is preempted. Such concepts are virtually synonymous for wrongful copying and are in no meaningful fashion distinguishable from infringement of a copyright. The broad misappropriation doctrine relied upon by the district court is, therefore, the equivalent of exclusive rights in copyright law. At the same time, other Second Circuit case law, beginning shortly after the INS decision, has greatly limited the application of INS to general product copying. In these cases, typically, the doctrine requiring "secondary meaning" is invoked to bar plaintiff's recovery. An illustrative case is the 1929 decision in Cheney Bros. v. Doris Silk Corp., decided a decade after INS. Many of the plaintiff's fabric designs (80%) were unsuccessful; plaintiff copied successful designs. The designs were not practicably copyrighted or patented, so that "the plaintiff, which is put to much ingenuity and expense in fabricating them, finds itself without protection of any sort for its pains." Since the designs were short lived, plaintiff sought "hot-news" type of protection from equity, for less than a year. The Second Circuit, per Judge Learned Hand, denied relief: "In the absence of some recognized right at common law, or under the statutes—and the plaintiff claims neither—a man's property is limited to the chattels which embody his invention. Others may imitate these at their pleasure." As for the INS case, on which the plaintiff sought to rely, the court refused to apply it beyond its particular fact pattern: Although that [case] concerned another subject-matter—printed news dispatches—we agree that, if it meant to lay down a general doctrine, it would cover this case; at least, the language of the majority opinion goes so far. We do not believe that it did. While it is of