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Post to respond to:

Issues: Whether there is an issue of whether Plaintiff has suffered any monetary damages under the copyright act. Also, whether the defendant had used the Plaintiff’s copyrighted trademark to profit with bad faith.  

Court Holding: The court Denies the Defendant’s claim for summary judgment. The court Grants in Part and Denies in Part the Plaintiffs claim for summary judgment.

To put the Plaintiff’s claims into more detail, Plaintiff’s Cybersquatting claim was granted. Plaintiff’s Copyright claim was granted for liability, but not for damages. Plaintiff’s summary of judgment against the Defendant’s counterclaim for copyright infringement was granted. Plaintiff’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act was both granted and denied in part.

Court Rationale:

The Defendant assessed that the Plaintiff’s work was copyrightable because the Plaintiff’s and the JMRI’s (Java Model Railroad Interface) work expressed enough creativity in the selection, ordering and arrangement of the data collected in the subject copied files. The Plaintiff’s work was original because it was not copied and it showed at least a minimal amount of creativity.

 The Defendant argued that the case should be dropped because there was a lack of a monetary damages figure in the facts and records. Under the Copyright Act, the owner of the violated Copyright can recover compensatory damages equal to the amount of actual damage caused by the Defendant or a disgorgement of profits that were gained from the result of the infringement. There is evidence that there are Monetary values on the works that was created by the people of the JMRI project.

 The Plaintiff, owner of the Decoderpro trademark, accused the Defendant of Copyright infringement. The trademark owner must establish that he or she owns the trademark, the trademark is distinctive famous, the defendant’s domain name is similar to the point of being confusing to that of the Plaintiff’s domain name, the defendant used, trafficked, or registered the domain name, and the defendant made profits with the trademark in bad faith. All of these scenarios were true.

The Plaintiff owns the decoder files that are of the subject of Copyright Infringement. The Plaintiff shows that he is the copyright owner. However, the Plaintiff cannot prove that the defendant caused any damages with the Copyright Infringement Claim.

The Defendant made a counter claim for Copyright Infringement. However, the Plaintiff argued that the JMRI had permission to reproduce and distribute the QS Industries’ material.  Plaintiff also argued that any limitations of the license was not communicated properly. The Plaintiff also argued that JMRI’s work would be fair even without a license because it was for non-profit educational purposes rather than being used for profit and commercial use. Lastly, the Plaintiff argued that the Defendant’s claim should be barred with the doctrine of laches. This doctrine accuses the person making a claim that he or she had the knowledge but did not act upon those duties against the accused party (the Plaintiff). It took the Defendant 27 months to make a counterclaim while the Defendant did not notify the Plaintiff about the claim for Copyright Infringement.

The Plaintiff argued that the information in the JMRI Project Decoder Definition Files constituted copyright management information with the scope of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Plaintiff also contested that the Defendant removed important information such as the author and copyright owners of the work. The Defendant used tools to copy the information within the JMRI Project Decoder Definition Files to use for their own use. However, the Defendant’s knowledge and intent of this issue was not revealed, so this particular claim was both Granted and Denied in part.

Opinion: I agree with Court’s holding. I feel like the court did a good job of assessing the facts with the law in order to make their decisions. If more information had been revealing in some of the ambiguous instances, such as dealing with monetary fines and the Defendant’s intent with copying/using the Decoder Definition Files, it is likely that the court would have ruled even further in the Plaintiff’s claim. However, since that information was not on the table at the time, I feel like the court made the right decisions.

Another response (use as reference):

Even though I am not a lawyer or an expert on reading cases I also thought the courts had a pretty easy decision in denying the summary judgment. It seems as though both parties was just lacking detailed evidence to support their claims. Considering the courts granted in part and denied in part the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Claim I would have tried in in trial also. That thought never crossed my mind until you mentioned it. I do think the plaintiff has a good chance to win this claim fully if they get a little more evidence and facts when they present it before the judge in trial. I do think the defendant was aware and had complete knowledge and intent of the actions they were taking. If the courts found that there was some technological process in regards to the author, title, reference of license, copyright notice, and the copyright owner of the plaintiff you would think they would favor completely for the plaintiff but I guess they have to be careful with their ruling in order to protect themselves. In my opinion, the defendant was lucky when they formatted the copying for their own use by not leaving a trace of a tool behind showing how they translated the JMRI files for their own personal good.