A 'Pyrrhic Victory' for Capitol Records
The music publisher tries to recover $7 million in legal fees in a copyright suit, but a judge is unsympathetic.
April 27, 2015 at 02:06 AM
3 minute read
Calling Capitol Records Inc.'s copyright win against defunct music storage service MP3-tunes and its founder a “Pyrrhic victory,” a federal judge in Manhattan ruled in April that he'd grant the record company “only a fraction” of the $7 million that it sought in attorney fees.
In March 2014 a jury found MP3tunes and its founder, Michael Robertson, liable for infringing Capitol Records' copyrights and awarded $48 million in damages. In September U.S. District Judge William Pauley III slashed the award to $12.2 million, ruling that many of the record company's claims were “just too big to succeed.” (MP3tunes is no longer in business, and Robertson has appealed.)
Capitol Records and its lawyers at Jenner & Block asked for an award of attorney fees and costs, claiming the company spent more than $12 million pressing its case against MP3tunes. (Pryor Cashman also represented Capitol Records.) Pauley concluded that Robertson's conduct did warrant some amount of fee-shifting, but he made it clear that he also found some of Capitol Records' conduct during the case to be far from ideal.
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