On Friday, the Supreme Court decided Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy. This case involved the statute of limitations and remedies under the Copyright Act. The Copyright Act provides that a plaintiff must file suit "within three years after the claim accrued." 17 U. S. C. §507(b). When does a claim accrue? When the infringement occurred? Or when the plaintiff discovered the infringement? The circuits have divided on this question. Justice Kagan laid out the split:
Under the Copyright Act, a plaintiff must file suit"within three years after the claim accrued." §507(b). On one understanding of that limitations provision, a copyright claim "accrue[s]" when "an infringing act occurs." Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., 572 U. S. 663, 670 (2014). So a plaintiff can complain about infringements going back only three years from the time he filed suit. If that rule governed, many of Nealy's claims would be untimely, because they alleged infringements occurring as much as ten years earlier. But under an alternative view of the Act's limitations provision, a claim accrues when "the plaintiff discovers, or with due diligence should have discovered," the infringing act. Ibid., n. 4. That so-called discovery rule, used in the Circuit where Nealy sued, enables a diligent plaintiff to raise claims about even very old infringements if he discovered them within the prior three years.
Until fairly recently, I had never given this issue any thought. I never took an IP class in law school, and know very little about the subject. Until recently, at least.
