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Crescent Publishing Group, Inc. v. Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

Questioning the decision to award fees to defendant in a copyright infringement case without holding an evidentiary hearing on plaintiff's good faith belief in its ownership interest or allowing plaintiff the opportunity to challenge defendant's legal invoices, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court's decision awarding attorneys' fees after plaintiff was unable to obtain the necessary proof of copyright ownership in a published photograph. Vacated and remanded.

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Argued: December 6, 2000

Appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Nicholas J. Tsoucalas, Judge of the United States Court of International Trade, sitting by designation), awarding the defendant-appellee attorneys’ fees under section 101 of the Copyright Act of 1976, codified at 17 U.S.C. � 505.

We hold that the District Court erred by determining the propriety and the amount of the attorneys’ fee award without allowing the plaintiff to present evidence when the plaintiff’s filings suggested the existence of material disputes of fact incapable of resolution from the record. We also conclude that, under the Copyright Act, evidence of the actual billing arrangement between a prevailing party and its private counsel is a significant, though not necessarily controlling, factor in determining what fee is “reasonable” using the lodestar method. We thus vacate the award and remand the case to the District Court to conduct further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

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