A recent grant of certiorari will determine whether formality should prevail over the reality of what the trial court unquestionably knows. On June 3, 2019, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Holguin-Hernandez v. United...more
Copyright infringement litigation has been on the rise in recent years, particularly in the Central District of California, with the apparel industry feeling the brunt of this uptick. In a typical case, a plaintiff alleges...more
Supreme Court Abolished Federal Circuit's Test for Willfulness - On June 13, 2016, in Halo Electronics, Inc. v. Pulse Electronics, Inc., 579 U.S. ___ (2016), the Supreme Court unanimously abrogated the Federal Circuit’s...more
Under 17 USC § 505, a “court may . . . award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party.” However, when deciding whether to award attorneys’ fees under the Copyright Act’s fee-shifting provision, 17 USC § 505, the...more
Obvious Combinations Do Not Need to Be Physically Combinable - In Allied Erecting and Dismantling Co., Inc. v. Genesis Attachments, LLC, Appeal No. 2015-1533, the Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s invalidity finding...more
The Copyright Act states that the trial court “may…award” attorney’s fees to the prevailing party. Legal fees incurred by plaintiffs and defendants alike in copyright and other intellectual property cases can be staggering,...more
Recently, in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court provided substantial guidance in an unsettled area of law by holding that, when deciding whether to award attorneys’ fees under 17 U.S.C. §505, the...more
In Depth - Under 17 USC § 505, a “court may … award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party.” However, when deciding whether to award attorneys’ fees under the Copyright Act’s fee-shifting provision, 17 USC...more
The case of Kirstaeng v. Wiley hit the headlines in 2013 when the Supreme Court held that importation and sale in the United States of books bought from the copyright owner in Thailand was not an infringement of copyright,...more
The day after it liberalized the standard for awarding enhanced damages in patent cases, a unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by Justice Kagan, substantially broadened lower courts’ discretion in granting...more
Last week in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Supreme Court held that district courts have wide discretion to grant attorney’s fee awards but should give substantial weight to whether the losing party was objectively...more
In Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., the Supreme Court clarified the test for awarding attorney’s fees when applying the Copyright Act’s discretionary fee-shifting provision, 17 U.S.C. § 505. The Court held that the...more
WHAT’S NEW - Yesterday, the Supreme Court provided substantial guidance in an unsettled area of law by holding that, in deciding whether to award attorneys’ fees under the Copyright Act’s fee-shifting provision, 17...more
On June 16, 2016, in an 8-0 decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 579 U.S. __, the U.S. Supreme Court held that when district courts determine whether or not to award discretionary attorney fees to prevailing...more
Supap Kirtsaeng realized he could buy cheaper, identical textbooks in Thailand and resell them for a profit in the U.S. John Wiley & Sons, the publisher of some of these textbooks, sued him for copyright infringement. ...more
On Monday, October 19, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear two patent infringement cases on the issue of willfulness. The first case is Stryker Corp. v. Zimmer Inc. and the second one is Halo Elecs., Inc....more
Addressing the degree to which litigation conduct can preclude the recovery of fees under 35 U.S. C. § 285, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated the denial of a fee award, finding that sloppy litigation...more
Last week, in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, the United States Supreme Court changed the law in the 4th Circuit, which includes North Carolina. North Carolina police officers will now work in a world in which it is easier for a...more
The Supreme Court of the United States, in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, waded into the metaphysical discussion of what plaintiffs must prove about corrections officers’ state of mind in a lawsuit alleging the officers used...more
On June 22, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Kinsgley v. Hendrickson, No. 13-1175, holding that to prove an excessive force claim, a pretrial detainee need show only that an officer’s deliberate use of force was...more