Only named defendant’s profits can be awarded in trademark -suit, Justice’s rule

Opinion analysis

The problem in Dewberry Group v. Dewberry Engineers is whether a federal court calculating the defendant’s profits in a trademark violation lawsuit may include all the profits for related units in the same business group. Justice Elena Kagan’s concise opinion to a unanimous court rejected the square in the lower court, as they can only be awarded the profits of the named defendant.

Kagan noted that the statute on which the lower courts depended, points to “accused’s profits” and that “defendant” in ordinary parlance “refers to” the party against which relief … sought in an action. “Because Dewberry engineers who brought the suit” chose not to add the affiliated companies “-who turned a surplus-as defendant in her trial, she justified that their” profits are not the (lawful unclear) ‘defendant’s profits.’ ” identity, and that she under these rules ””[i]T is long settled… that separate incorporated organizations are separate legal entities with different legal rights and responsibilities. “

In fact, Kagan noted that the applicant “cannot and also disputes these points.” Rather, Dewberry Engineers presents a number of other new arguments as to why it may have been able to get a larger replacement price. For example, “If the defendant redirected some of its earnings to an affiliated books,” a court may conclude that an award limited to the accused’s profits is, in the words of the statute, “inadequate,” and thus “goes into judgment for such a sum as the court will find out to be fair.” However, the problem explained that Kagan is that this “is not a sustainable takeover of” the decisions below that never considered that part of the statute.

For the same reason, even though the United States suggests that courts in a case like this could “pierce” the corporate blur to collapse all units in one, Kagan had no interest in pursuing this approach, which was also not presented to the courts below. Kagan repeatedly emphasized that the court’s possession was narrow as the judges left it “up to the lower courts to decide” whether the applicant and the government could claim these new theories when the case returns to the lower court. “Everything we hold today,” emphasized Kagan, “is that the courts below were wrong to treat the Dewberry Group and its affiliated companies as a single unit in the calculation of ‘accused’s profits.’ Dewberry Group is the only defendant here, and under this language, only its own profits can be recovered.

This opinion is far more likely to find a place as a short excerpt in Casebooks about companies than in materials on trademark law, as the narrow path needed to return to the lower court’s decision here, says little or nothing the at least a little novel or interesting about the trademark law itself.