Federal judge says lawyer must pay $87K for filing 'objectively baseless' suit over Web news posts
A California lawyer has been ordered to pay $87,000 in attorney fees for his litigation opponents because he pursued an “objectively baseless” copyright claim in a federal lawsuit over articles about him that were posted by an Internet news aggregator.
Dionne Choyce should have realized, after his initial lawsuit against San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center and its Internet service provider was dismissed, without prejudice, that it was time to reassess the strength of his case, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar wrote in a Monday opinion (PDF) in the Northern District of California litigation.
Instead, the attorney filed another copyright case against the same defendants, asserting federal question jurisdiction and appending a state law defamation claim. The defamation claim was dismissed when the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction. The copyright claim, which was based on a photograph of Choyce published on the center’s Indybay.org news site, lacked merit: The attorney was not the creator of the photo and it was not a work for hire, since Choyce was unlikely to have hired a staff photographer as an employee of his law firm when he opened his own office and had his picture taken, the opinion explains.
“Plaintiff’s copyright claim was, to put it bluntly, objectively baseless,” Tigar writes. “At the time plaintiff filed his complaint, plaintiff had not even applied for a copyright registration. The court first dismissed the claim without prejudice, which should have given plaintiff an opportunity to assess the strength of his claims, and take whatever steps were necessary to ensure that he had a valid claim to assert. Instead, he filed a registration application which identified himself as the ‘author’ of the image, which he knew he was not. And then, when faced with the argument that he still had no valid ownership interest in any copyright, he resorted to additional meritless arguments.”
Hence, although the $117,114.61 sought by the defendants for filing two motions to dismiss the copyright complaint “is a very significant amount,” the defendants “are presumptively entitled to their lodestar,” the judge continued, referring to a multiplier that is sometimes applied to increase an attorney fee award because success was achieved in the case.
It is not clear from the opinion whether a multiplier was in fact applied to reach the $87,835 award against Choyce. However, the opinion calls the defense of the case a “complete victory” and, discussing the general rules for a judge’s discretionary award of attorney fees to prevailing defendants under the federal Copyright Act, refers to reasonable attorney fees and a reasonable number of hours worked as a “starting point.”
The judge did reduce the fee award requested by Choyce’s opponents by 25 percent in order to reflect the approximate amount of time spent defending the copyright case and exclude defense of the defamation claim.
Choyce did not immediately respond to a Wednesday afternoon request for comment by the ABA Journal.
Hat tip: Courthouse News.
See also:
Billboard (2004): “Case Analysis: Recovering Defendants’ Attorney’s Fees in Copyright-Infringement Cases”
