Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

Re: Statutory Penalties - Copyright

You get monetary penalties, costs and attorney fees. You should have an attorney handling this because you get an award of your attorney fees if you have filed for federal copyright protection. Feel free to contact us on this.

Re: Statutory Penalties - Copyright

The remedies for copyright violations can be found in their most boiled-down form in the Copyright Act itself; see 17 U.S.C.A. 501 through 511, but principally 502 to 505 for civil remedies.

They are broken down into Injunctions (Sec. 502); Impounding and disposing of infringing articles (Sec. 503); Damages and forfeiture of profits (Sec. 504); and Costs and attorney's fees (Sec. 505).

The remedy of damages and profits calls for actual damages based upon either the loss to the victim and the additional profit to the infringer; or, in the alternative, statutory damages as set forth in Sec. 504(c). Read that section for the details as to the amounts available under the statute.

Sec. 505 gives the court discretion to award costs to any party and attorney's fees to a prevailing party.

The number of violations, as you will see when you read the sections describing damages, are not too important; what's important is the aggregate money damages you can prove. The statutory damages, if elected, would cover "all infringements involved in the action, with respect to one work" so repeated viewings might lead to higher actual damages but not to higher statutory damages.

The statutory damages provision of the law is probably there as a fall-back for people who can't prove the amount of actual money damages they have sustained.

Note that there may also sometimes be criminal penalties in addition to civil damages. See Sec. 506.