U.S. appeals court okays Starz copyright claims against Amazon’s MGM

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From Reuters:

MGM Studios’ television division on Thursday lost a bid at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to escape hundreds of copyright claims by Starz Entertainment LLC over a licensing agreement gone sour.

The appeals court said that TV network Starz could pursue damages for several instances of alleged infringement that occurred years before the case began.

MGM said in a statement that it was disappointed in the decision, which it said conflicts with rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The company said it is considering “further appellate options” and looks forward to defending against the claims on their merits.

. . . .

Starz signed agreements with MGM in 2013 and 2015 to pay nearly $70 million for the exclusive right to show hundreds of MGM TV shows and movies, including the James Bond film series, “Mad Max” and “The Terminator.”

A Starz employee learned in 2019 that MGM’s film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” was available to stream on Amazon’s platform during the exclusivity period. MGM later told Starz that it had also licensed many other shows and movies to other services.

Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion earlier this year.

Starz sued MGM in Los Angeles federal court in 2020 for violating their contracts and its copyright interests in the licensed works.

MGM asked the court to dismiss 381 of Starz’s 1,020 copyright claims, arguing they involved licenses that expired more than three years before Starz sued. According to MGM, the Supreme Court in a 2014 case imposed a “strict bar” to infringement damages from more than three years before a lawsuit is filed.

The 9th Circuit on Thursday agreed with the district court that the bar does not apply when a plaintiff like Starz could not have reasonably been aware of the infringement when it happened.

“Adopting a damages bar would mean that a copyright plaintiff who, through no fault of its own, discovers an act of infringement more than three years after the infringement occurred would be out of luck,” U.S. Circuit Judge Kim Wardlaw wrote for a three-judge panel. “Such a harsh rule would distort the tenor of the statute.”

Wardlaw also said the rule would “incentivize” infringement, noting that modern technology has made it “easier to commit, harder to detect, and tougher to litigate.”

Link to the rest at Reuters

PG included this as a second story about this litigation because The Authors Guild story was primarily focused on patting itself on the back because the 9th Circuit quoted parts of the Guild’s brief. Evidently the person who wrote the AG article didn’t understand that appellate courts quote from briefs filed with the court on a regular basis.

PG hasn’t dug into the trial material in the 9th Circuit case, but in prior cases, the Supremes have declined to follow the 9th Circuit’s reasoning. The 9th Circuit has been known as the most-frequently-reversed of the Circuits, but its judges continue to go off on legal frolics hither and yon on a regular basis and seems to be immune to embarrassment for its behavior.

16 thoughts on “U.S. appeals court okays Starz copyright claims against Amazon’s MGM”

  1. While I can see the AuthGuild’s desire to argue discoverability is difficult for individual authors who can’t be expected to police every possible site out there, I’m not sure I see how the argument holds that:

    a. MGM licensed it to STARZ;
    b. Millions were at stake;
    c. If you want to know if your properties are available anywhere else, you can pay a programmer on FIVERR $50 or less to take you list of properties/movies and design a quick search engine aggregator that could be run daily if desired to see where the movies are showing up; and,
    d. It was advertised, available and being watched on one of the top 5 streaming sites in US.

    So, sure, I guess, that DOES sound like too much work for a company to protect its assets.

    • Heck, they don’t even need to do that. I have an app on my phone that tells me exactly what streaming services have which show when I run a search. It lets me know if it’s for sale, rent, or general streaming. And it’s free.

      • Reliably?
        Android or iOS?
        Most importantly: how do they ake tbeir money? 😉

        (Inquiring minds.)

        • It’s called Just Watch and there’s a Premium option, although I’ve never needed it. I’m on Android and pinpointing the right show on the right service is fairly reliable. Sure beats logging into every one of my streaming channels and fighting their search engine.

    • Agreed, P.

      The facts don’t support the problem of the beleaguered individual author who can’t be expected to police her/his copyrights.

      MGM and STARZ have plenty of resources to check on copyright violations. The 9th Circuit is being its normal ditzy self and not considering the downside of a potentially perpetual statute of limitations on copyright infringement suits.

  2. Two side notes:

    (1) Although the Ninth Circuit is “known as” the most-frequently reversed, that’s accurate neither in general or in intellectual-property-oriented disputes. Ironically, the most-reversed circuit this century has been the Federal Circuit (there hasn’t been a full/true “affirmance” yet!), but the sample size is so small that everyone ignores it.

    Worse, some of this is a result of the Ninth Circuit often being the last to rule on a major/”cert-worthy” issue (huge docket! huge area!), and being confronted with arguments/doctrines developed elsewhere that leave everyone questioning their fit to the facts. Copyright law is an excellent example; so is pure civil procedure. That makes the Ninth Circuit’s ruling the one that looks like an “outlier” that the Supreme Court takes up to resolve the differences — whether right or not. (Indeed, the Ninth Circuit’s record on implicit circuit splits — a different circuit is in the crosshairs, and a position consistent with the Ninth’s prevails — is fourth-best out of thirteen this century.)

    (2) All of the circuit courts are frequently going “off on legal frolics hither and yon on a regular basis.” For example, the Fifth Circuit “specializes” in legal frolics that allow states to interfere with international relations; the Fourth Circuit has permanently raised the eyebrows of every bankruptcy and civil procedure scholar; and so on.

    The Ninth Circuit is, indeed, unwieldy. That’s a necessary consequence of the early-twentieth-century meme that “regional courts of appeals will consist of whole states only” combined with actual population growth; there is literally no possible “recasting” of the Ninth Circuit that doesn’t leave it with the largest docket unless we reduce the number of regional circuits!

    * * *

    None of this is to say I like much of this at all. I’m actually in favor of moving all IP disputes to the Federal Circuit and beefing up its bar, but that doesn’t get at the real cause of the “problem”: Blue slips (the Senate tradition that federal judges may be confirmed if, and only if, both Senators from the state in which that judge is to keep chambers return a traditionally-on-blue-paper approval).

      • That’s why I called it a “tradition,” not “requirement,” and it has indeed been resumed (consider the “controversy” over appointing a new judge to the bench in Kentucky that has been now made further “controversial” because the Senators can’t agree…).

        • We’ll have to see if it endures past next January.
          Given the tribalization of the Senate it may go away indefinitely.

    • Well, you could change the jurisdiction so the 9th circuit only covered, say, California, Hawaii, and the other Pacific Islands, then shift the other circuits around accordingly.

      That way, the size difference in dockets wouldn’t be quite so egregious.

    • C – I must respectfully disagree with you about the 9th Circuit reversal rates.

      1. Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2021 – “With Trump appointees, Supreme Court delivers 9th Circuit another year of reversals”

      “The Supreme Court’s favorite target again this year was the California-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which saw 15 of 16 rulings overturned on review.

      For decades, the high court’s conservatives have trained a skeptical eye on the historically liberal appeals court and regularly reversed its rulings, particularly on criminal law and the death penalty.

      But by some estimates, this year saw the most Supreme Court reversals of 9th Circuit decisions since 1985. And the range of issues was broad, including immigration, religion, voting rights, property rights and class-action lawsuits.”

      https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-07-13/with-trump-appointees-9th-circuit-suffers-another-year-of-reversals-at-supreme-court

      2. Pacific Research Institute – “This year (2021), the Supreme Court overturned 15 of the 16 cases originating from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

      https://www.pacificresearch.org/supreme-court-hands-9th-circuit-highest-year-of-reversals-since-1985/

      3. Ballotpedia – SCOTUS case reversal rates (2007 – Present)

      “Since 2007, the 9th Circuit had a reversal rate of 80.4 percent. That is the second-highest reversal rate behind the 6th Circuit (81.5 percent).”

      https://ballotpedia.org/SCOTUS_case_reversal_rates_(2007_-_Present)

      • I was relying upon the SCOTUSBlog database (as-disinterested-as-it-gets, which isn’t entirely disinterested enough), consolidated, for the period 01 Oct 2000 onward. If one resets the “period of interest” it’s possible to “prove” darned near anything with the increasingly small datasets, especially year by year. For example, for the Term beginning 07 Oct 2019, the Ninth Circuit fared rather better…

        So we’ll have to agree to disagree, and certainly on the datasets. This is, of course, one of those disagreements over just how insane everything is, which is rather disturbing in this context.

        • I don’t mind disagreeing with those who are respectful in their disagreement.

          In that sentiment, I’m afraid that I’m hopelessly old school on today’s internet.

          • One further note, and I haven’t gone yet into all of the data (which is complicated by the Fourth Circuit’s culture of a vastly lower proportion of reported versus unreported opinions):

            If one calculates the reversal rate based on total decisions from that court, rather than merely against the number of petitions for certiorari granted (that is, the number of cases the Supreme Court chooses ot hear), things look somewhat different. The Federal Circuit looks even worse, and the more-active circuits look more “normalized,” whether one is looking at either “just reported decisions” or “all dispositions” as the denominator. The problem is that this adds a lot of decimal points, and makes the fine distinctions much less meaningful in both the abstract and the statistical-analysis sense.

            The Supreme Court this century has typically heard from 50 to 60 appeals from federal courts of appeal each Term (the remainder coming from state courts). Due to its sheer size, the 9th Circuit gets “more attention,” such as the 9 cases (well, technically 11 because two of its cases were joined with other circuits that for traditional reasons were the “headliners”) in the 2019 term.

            In 2018, which would have generated almost all decisions to be potentially reviewed on certiorari in the Supreme Court’s 2019 Term, the Ninth Circuit issued 3,973 dispositions of appeals, and if I’m reading the Clerk’s Office release correctly dismissed another 974 because the parties settled prior to disposition. That is, those 9 (or 11) decisions are about 0.18% of the 9th Circuit’s workload. Even if all of them had been reversed (they weren’t, and two that were reversed were as a result of intervening statutory changes), that’s a pretty darned good accuracy rate for anything relating to human behavior. And highly consistent with the other geographic circuits (only the DC and Federal Circuits have above-0.25%-of-workload reversal rates).

            Which, I suppose, just demonstrates yet again that statistical measures are just as subject to distortion as eyewitness identifications…

Comments are closed.