SCOTUS rejects pair of copyright and design patent suits
The US Supreme Court yesterday, March 9, rejected two disputes covering design patents in the automobile sector and the provision of inaccurate information to the US Copyright Office.
Automotive Body Parts Association v Ford Global Technologies
The Automotive Body Parts Association (ABPA), an association of automotive parts distributors, had challenged two design patents covering car hoods and headlamps on the Ford’s F-150 pickup truck.
The Supreme Court’s rejection of the dispute leaves standing a US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision, which found in favour of Ford.
In July last year, the Federal Circuit refused to import the doctrine of ‘aesthetic functionality’ from trademark law into the realm of design patents, claiming that the ABPA had invited the court “to rewrite established law to permit ABPA to evade [Ford’s] patent rights”.
The ABPA also argued that “the sale of an F-150 truck totally exhausts any design patents embodied in the truck and permits use of Ford’s designs on replacement parts so long as those parts are intended for use with Ford’s trucks”.
But, the Federal Circuit rejected this argument, ruling that exhaustion applied only to items sold with the authorisation of the patent owner.
ABPA subsequently filed a petition for certiorari in February this year.
Gold Value International Textile v Sanctuary Clothing
At the centre of the clash between fabric supplier Gold Value (which does business as Fiesta Fabric) and apparel company Sanctuary Clothing is the provision of inaccurate information to the US Copyright Office.
“Fiesta had mistakenly overlooked the completion of a single box on the copyright registration form for the subject design. Because this box went unchecked, Fiesta’s designs were registered as ‘unpublished’ works instead of ‘published’ works,” said the company in its petition for certiorari, filed in November last year.
Fiesta was seeking to overturn a US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling, which found that Fiesta had knowingly put inaccurate information into its copyright registration, making the registration was invalid.
The petition added: “The Ninth Circuit contravened decades of its own case law and created a split with the Eleventh Circuit and most others by invalidating Fiesta’s registration, terminating its case, and awarding against it $121,423.01 in attorneys’ fees and costs.”
Fiesta went on to claim that if the decision is left intact, it puts hundreds of thousands of copyrights across the country in danger, and establishes as “precedential a ruling that directly conflicts with the spirit and letter of the statute”.
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