Category: Damages

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Copyright Damages

Ninth Circuit Narrows Copyright Owner’s Ability to Receive Multiple Statutory Damages Awards

The following post comes from Liz Velander, a recent graduate of Scalia Law and a Research Assistant at CPIP.

a gavel lying on a desk in front of booksBy Liz Velander

A recent Ninth Circuit ruling limits the amount a copyright owner can be awarded in statutory damages. In Desire v. Manna, the court found that the Copyright Act only lets owners collect a single award per infringing work in cases with joint and several liability. It held that the Act does not authorize multiple statutory damages awards where one infringer is jointly and severally liable with all other infringers, but the other infringers are not completely jointly and severally liable with one another. Its decision reduced the district court’s award of statutory damages from $480,000 to $150,000.

The facts of the case are as follows: Desire, a fabric supplier, purchased a floral textile design and registered it with the U.S. Copyright Office in June 2015. A few months later, Desire sold a few yards of fabric bearing the design to Top Fashion, which it used to secure a garment order from a clothing retailer. When Desire and Top Fashion later disagreed on the price for more fabric, Top Fashion took the design to rival supplier Manna. Manna then passed the design along to an independent designer, who in turn gave it to a textile manufacturer with instructions to modify it. Manna registered a copyright in the resulting altered design with the U.S. Copyright Office in December 2015.

Manna began selling fabric bearing the altered design to various manufacturers, which used it to create garments that they sold to various clothing retailers. Desire sued Manna, the manufacturers, and the retailers for copyright infringement. As alleged, Manna infringed Desire’s copyright by selling fabric bearing the altered design to the manufacturer defendants. The manufacturer defendants then each allegedly committed a separate ac of infringement in their sales to the individual retail defendants, who in turn allegedly committed acts of infringement in their sales to consumers. Desire did not allege that the manufacturer defendants infringed in concert, nor that the retail defendants acted in concert to infringe Desire’s copyright.

The district court granted partial summary judgment for Desire. It concluded that Desire owned a valid copyright entitled to broad protection and that there were no triable issues of fact as to Desire’s ownership of the initial design or Manna’s and others’ access to it. But there remained issues of triable fact as to whether the altered design was substantially similar to the original and whether defendants willfully infringed. The district court held that if Desire prevailed on these issues, the supplier would be entitled to seven statutory damages awards with joint and several liability imposed amongst Manna, the manufacturer defendants, and the retail defendants.

A jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff, finding that Manna, Top Fashion, and one other defendant, manufacturer ABN, willfully infringed the initial design, and that two other defendants, manufacturer Pride & Joys and retailer 618 Main, innocently infringed. Desire elected to claim statutory damages in lieu of actual damages, as permitted under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(1). Under § 504(c), a statutory damage award is limited to $30,000 for innocent infringement and $150,000 for willful infringement.

The jury awarded Desire statutory damages totaling $480,000 after two defendants settled. The district court divided liability under its pre-trial ruling as follows:

    1. $150,000 against Manna individually, for copying the design and distributing the fabric bearing the altered design to the manufacturer defendants.

 

    1. $150,000 against Manna and Top Fashion jointly and severally, for Top Fashion’s sale of infringing garments.

 

    1. $150,000 against Manna and ABN jointly and severally, for ABN’s sale of infringing garments.

 

    1. $20,000 against Manna and Pride & Joys jointly and severally, for ABN’s sale of infringing garments to 618 Main.

 

  1. $10,000 against 618 Main, Pride & Joys, and Manna jointly and severally, for 618 Main’s display and sale of infringing garments to consumers.

The parties appealed. The Ninth Circuit affirmed in part, reversed in part, and vacated the judgment awarding Desire multiple awards of statutory damages. The court began by affirming the district court’s determinations at summary judgment that Desire owned a valid copyright and that the original design was entitled to broad copyright protection. But the Ninth Circuit concluded that the district court erred by permitting multiple statutory damages awards.

The Ninth Circuit looked at the text of § 504(c)(1) to determine whether it authorizes multiple statutory damages awards where one infringer is jointly and severally liable with all other infringers, but the other infringers are not completely jointly and severally liable with one another. § 504(c)(1) permits an owner to recover “an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally.”

The Court concluded that the plain meaning of § 504(c)(1) precludes multiple awards of statutory damages when there is only one work infringed by a group of defendants that have partial joint and several liability among themselves through a prime tortfeasor that is jointly and severally liable with every other defendant. It reasoned that “an award” clearly means one award, and the use of the word “any” means that, if all infringers in the action were jointly and severally liable with at least one common infringer, then all defendants should be treated as one unit.

In this case, Manna was alleged to be the tortfeasor lynchpin. Because “‘an award’ clearly means one award,” and Manna was jointly and severally liable with every other defendant, Desire was entitled to only one statutory damage award per work. The court concluded that its interpretation was most consistent with the Copyright Act’s goal of providing adequate compensation for infringement without giving copyright owners a windfall. However, it acknowledged that its ruling could also run afoul of the purposes of the Act if a copyright owner decided to sue separate infringers in separate actions.

The court wrote in a footnote that “if Manna were not involved at all and Pride & Joys, ABN, and Top Fashion had independently infringed, there could be three awards, even though Pride & Joys, ABN, and Top Fashion were each jointly and severally liable with others in their separate distribution chains. . . . This view treats groups of jointly and severally liable defendants that are not jointly and severally liable with other groups identically to individually liable infringers.”

In a lengthy dissent, Judge Wardlaw disagreed with the majority’s interpretation of § 504(c)(1). She explained that the majority’s decision means “a copyright plaintiff can seek only one award of statutory damages when it joins in a single lawsuit members of independently infringing distribution chains that trace back to a common infringing source. But if the plaintiff brings separate lawsuits against each infringer, or it simply cuts the common source defendant at the top of the chain out of the case, a separate statutory damages award is available against each defendant.”

The majority ultimately decided that such risk was outweighed by the potential for disproportionate awards and the fact that multiple lawsuits could still be filed (and consolidated), regardless of the Court’s ruling on this point. “But even if we are wrong in our appraisal of the multiple-lawsuit risk, as our approach is the only one consistent with the text of Section 504(c)(1), it is not our job to reweigh the merits of several possible approaches.” Given the stark differences in the majority and the dissent regarding the language of § 504(c)(1), this decision could form the basis for further splits and result in an en banc or certiorari petition.

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Patent Policy Debates Characterized by "Intolerably High Ratio of Theory to Evidence"

In an interview with Law360 last week, FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright spoke about the FTC’s upcoming study on PAEs and the state of today’s patent policy debates. The interview is well-worth reading in it’s entirety, and we’ve also highlighted a couple key quotes below.

“One of the most fascinating things about the the policy debates in and around patents and by extension the intersection of patent law and antitrust law, is that most of the debate is chock full of theory and supposition but completely devoid of empirical evidence…It is very difficult to move forward sensibly in debates with those characteristics”

“Wright said that without evidence of ‘pervasive market failure’ in the standard setting space, the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice should avoid the temptation to serve as ‘management consultant’ to standard setting groups and their members.”

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Antitrust Commercialization Damages DOJ Economic Study FTC High Tech Industry Innovation International Law Law and Economics Patent Law Patent Licensing Patent Litigation Reasonable Royalty Remedies Software Patent Uncategorized

An Insightful Analysis of “Fair and Reasonable” in the Determination of FRAND Terms

By Steven Tjoe

In his forthcoming George Mason University Law Review article entitled “The Meaning of ‘Fair and Reasonable’ in the Context of Third-Party Determination of FRAND Terms,” Professor Damien Geradin explores the delicate balance of interests protected by the current system of arm’s length negotiations in the standard-setting process, and the detrimental effect disrupting this balance would have on standards-related technologies and our innovation economy.

Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (“FRAND”) commitments are the subject of frequent criticism in both legal and economic literature.  Many policymakers, practitioners, and academics have argued that the inherent ambiguity in establishing “fair and reasonable” terms creates inefficiencies and perverse incentives for standard-essential patent (“SEP”) holders to exercise ex post opportunism.  Based on this belief, some now argue that the standard-setting organization (“SSO”) contracting process is broken and requires additional legal and regulatory mechanisms to afford standard implementers greater protection.

Professor Geradin’s article brings some much-needed balance to this debate.  By highlighting the economic principles and the carefully negotiated terms underlying current SSO contracting processes, Geradin exposes the pitfalls of many of the reforms suggested.  Geradin’s analysis elucidates the SSO contracting process itself through dissection of the intensive discussions and negotiations giving rise to the prominent ETSI Intellectual Property Rights (“IPR”) policy, a policy that played a fundamental standardization role in the wireless communication field.  The ETSI IPR policy shows that its members understood the notions of “fairness and reasonable” to define a fair balance between the interests of SEP holders and standard implementers – securing the availability of the standards while simultaneously ensuring that SEP holders are “adequately and fairly rewarded for the use of their [intellectual property rights].”

Professor Geradin addresses two potential forms of ex post opportunism – “hold-up” and “royalty stacking” – and observes that though both could occur in theory, there is little evidence to suggest that they occur in real-world patent licensing.  Regarding the hold-up conjecture, Geradin observes that the relative absence of hold-up is consistent with the economics of contracting: parties who repeatedly deal with each other will limit opportunism to protect their reputation.  Similarly, royalty stacking is a rare occurrence in high-technology, where cross-licensing is common and greatly diminishes the risk of royalty-stacking.  Given the absence of empirical evidence demonstrating opportunistic behavior by SEP holders, Geradin cautions against implementing reforms that systematically weaken the bargaining power of SEP holders, as proposed reforms may themselves trigger reciprocal opportunistic behavior – such as “reverse hold-up” – by standard implementers.

In the context of FRAND licensing, Geradin observes that for rewards to be adequate and fair, they must not only compensate SEP holders for their risky R&D investments (including investments in prior failed projects), they must also give SEP holders sufficient incentive to keep investing in the development of standardized technologies.  The negative consequences of systematically offering below-FRAND terms to SEP holders are two-fold.  First, as Geradin eloquently observes, “[i]t is a basic law of finance that capital flows where the best opportunities arise,” and developers of technologies in standardized sectors unduly constrained by low returns may seek opportunities outside the standardized sectors.  Second, without adequate returns, major technological contributors may decide to no longer participate in SSOs in order to avoid being bound by FRAND commitments.  As a result, standards would likely fail to incorporate the best technology available.

Accordingly, Geradin is skeptical of many of the policy measures suggested to provide additional protections to potential licensees and consumers of standardized technologies.  One such measure is the “ex ante incremental value method,” where the rate that would have resulted from ex ante competition between the technology in question and alternative technological solutions serves as a benchmark to whether a royalty is fair and reasonable.  As Geradin observes:

While the pricing of SEPs at incremental value may facilitate the dissemination of the standard in the short-term, the licensing fee resulting from the incremental value of the SEP holder’s technology would certainly not be enough to properly compensate the investment costs and risks [a] company incurred in developing its superior technology, as well as to incentivize it to make investment in new technologies.

With respect to this method, Geradin concludes that the “ex ante incremental rule is thus not so much an instrument to prevent the theoretical risks of hold-up, but a tool to lower royalty rates to the benefit of standard implementers.”  As such, the ex ante incremental value rule could potentially have a devastating impact on innovation incentives and standards.

Geradin next explores the multi-factor test contained in Georgia-Pacific Corp. v. United States Plywood Corp. (“Georgia-Pacific”).  In Georgia-Pacific, a federal district court established a framework by which fifteen factors offering a variety of benchmarks are used to compute reasonable royalty damages by contemplating a “hypothetical negotiation” between a “willing licensor” and “willing licensee” at the time the infringement began.  Geradin observes:

A key strength of the Georgia-Pacific framework is that it is sufficiently flexible to establish a balance between the dual objective of SSO’s IPR policies … which are both to ensure standard dissemination and adequate remuneration of the SEP holder.  In other words, unlike abstract mathematical methods, which … can be easily tipped in favor of the prospective licensee (or the prospective licensor), the multi-factor test at the core of the Georgia-Pacific framework reduces the risk of bias if it is properly carried out.

As such, the Georgia-Pacific framework can better reflect the reality of contract negotiations, where the parties look to a variety of factors, and not some magic formula, to come to mutually acceptable licensing terms.

In the context of FRAND litigation, however, Geradin cautions against potential pitfalls of applying the Georgia-Pacific framework.  At the outset, Geradin notes that licensing agreements are often “highly relationship-specific and thus agreements will be hard to compare.”  Geradin discusses the practice of comparing the rate offered ex post standardization by SEP holders with the rate offered for the same patents ex ante standardization.  Though many are inclined to treat the ex ante rate as a “safe harbor” against any claim of opportunism, Geradin finds that there is little reason why licensors should be prohibited from charging higher rates ex post than ex ante.  Not only may ex post contracts be more efficient in the way they incorporate a clearer understanding of the technology and the market, but also forcing SEP holders to charge similar ex ante and ex post rates deprives SEP holders of giving preferential terms to early adopters of their technology.

Professor Geradin then explores whether patent pools offer a useful benchmark to determine FRAND license terms.  Due to the difficulties of forming pools and the different business models of the relevant patent holders, many standardized sectors simply do not have sizeable patent pools covering their standards.  Even where sizeable patent pools exist, Geradin observes that the pools often will not serve as the right benchmark for FRAND rate determination.  In many standardized sectors, such as in wireless communications, patent pools tend to be used by SEP holders to avoid transactions costs, rather than to obtain FRAND compensation.  Moreover, many patent pools base their method of remuneration on the number of a firm’s patents compared to the size of the pool rather than the relative strength of the patents themselves.  Where numerical proportionality serves as the metric of FRAND compensation, such as in the recent In re Innovatio IP Ventures LLC case, SEP holders have the incentive to inflate the number of patents they contribute to the pool.  Thus, using patent pools as a benchmark runs the risk of setting rates that are well below FRAND.

The potential welfare-reducing consequences of limiting the flexibility of the SSO negotiation process has been well documented in recent legal and economic literature.  As Professor Geradin observes, solutions to perceived FRAND inadequacies that aim to weaken the bargaining position of SEP holders often overreach, in effect triggering the “wholesale devaluation of patents.”  Instead, FRAND determinations should consider the “dynamic nature of standardization” and should be determined by balancing the need to (1) make standards available and, (2) fairly compensate SEP holders.  This delicate balance of interests is necessary to protect the future of standardization.