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Actual Damages For 1 Download = Cost of a 1 License
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Real View v 20-20 Technologies, it was held that the actual copyright infringement damages for a single unauthorized download of a computer program was the lost license fee that would have been charged. The judge, in the District Court of Massachusetts, granted remittitur, reducing the jury's verdict from $1,370,590.00 to $4200 unless the plaintiff seeks a new trial. Something tells me the plaintiff will seek a new trial."
Unauthorized downloads are very different from, say, selling a program as your creation. In this case, we are dealing with just copying apps without permission, so you are comparing apples and oranges.
Here's part of what the judge said in his instructions to the jury: " By statute -- and here is what the statute says -- you may award 20-20's lost profits resulting from the infringement and Real View's profits attributable to the infringement. In making this determination, you may consider what 20-20 may have reasonably charged for a license permitting Real View's use of the 20-20 Design program, any design costs that Real View saved by its use of the 20-20 Design and the development of ProKitchen and any benefit Real View obtained by its use of 20-20 Design in the development of ProKitchen." The jury ignored those instructions and incorrectly assessed a verdict based on an assumption that Real View had used infringing material in the product they sold. If they had done that and 20-20 had shown it in court, damages would have been appropriate. But no such thing was shown in court, so Real View was only entitled to actual damages equal to the cost they saved by stealing a copy of 20-20's program. As for how the courts and punish lawbreaking, there's a separate mechanism for that: award of punitive damages and court costs. There's no justification for improperly inflating actual damages.
it's worth pointing out in this case what the reason was that prompted the jury to award such a high award in the first place.
Both of the plaintiff and the defendant in this case are software development companies. In both cases, they produce CAD software for home and home design use. In this particular case, the particular software packages in question were those for kitchen design.
Real view were developing a freeware CAD package which would be supported by premium-priced furniture, appliance and decoration add-ons. In contrast, 20-20, which was already a major player in this market, sold a fully featured package for $4200.
The infringement in this case was that real view had illegally downloaded a pirate copy of 20-20's flagship product, and then used that as part of their development process for their own product. In particular, they effectively cloned the GUI and a number of other features, so that users who had previously used 20-20's product could switch to the new real view product without retraining.
Don't misrepresent the competitor's actions as using the illegally downloaded software to discover trade secrets of the original owner. He merely copied "Look and Feel". The court decided that the use the competitor made of the software itself was perfectly legal, and the only illegal action was the download itself.
Or perhaps you didn't read the fine court decision?
It's the big out-in-the-open secret - everyone knows about jury nullification, but the first rule of jury nullification is you don't talk about jury nullification.
Have you actually read the damn decision? At issue is one company downloading a competitor's product so that they could copy the software (it was found that they didn't actually copy the software, but the judge stated that the jury could consider whether the defendant saved time and effort in developing their software by taking inspiration from the pirated software.
Yeah, not the same thing at all.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".