Sorry for mixing bad idioms in the title, but we’re over the moon with a final decision on Andrew Paul Leonard’s lawsuit. We have done three articles on his 1.6 million dollar award for actual damages (only) in a copyright infringement case.  The links are at the end of this article if you wish to review them. Just note, the $35 reference in an early article, was when registration for multiple images was $35, not the current $55.

After losing at trial the defendant appealed to the 3rd Circuit, where Mr. Leonard won yet again. The defendant then sought to have the matter heard by the United States Supreme Court. On February 20, 2018, SCOTUS officially refused to hear the case as the defendants had requested.

This leaves Mr. Leonard with a final award of 1.6 million dollars plus many hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest in a case where he filed his copyright registration well beyond the 3-month grace period thus preventing him from seeking statutory damages and attorneys’ fees. The defendants’ rights of appeal are now exhausted. They have no further recourse.

One lesson to take away is that just because you may have filed your registration “late” you ought not assume that if you have a copyright infringement case to bring “it won’t be worth it”.  Attorneys who reject such cases out of hand before knowing the facts are often depriving their prospective clients and themselves of substantial recoveries.

Here are the three previous articles: Article 1, Article 2, Article 3