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Actual Damages For 1 Download = Cost of a 1 License

Posted by timothy on from the that's-refreshing dept.

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."

3 of 647 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cost of infringing open source? by hibiki_r · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:The actual damages... by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:The actual damages... by Mathinker · · Score: 5, Informative

    Perhaps you didn't read the fine article.

    The original owner would NOT have sold a license to the competitor. The competitor appears to have deprived the original owner of their LEAD TIME and possibly some sales.

    The competitor allegedly downloaded the software illegally and analyzed it to produce a competing product.

    This helped the competitor save lots of R&D time. And they sold many copies of the resulting competing product.

    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?