Aaron Moss, Litigation Department chair and copyright expert, shared his insights with Bloomberg Law regarding the legal divide between the Eleventh, Ninth, and Second Circuits on the timeframe by which rights holders may sue for damages under the Copyright Act. The split among circuits recently widened when the Eleventh Circuit held that plaintiffs may seek damages outside of the copyright law's three-year statute of limitations, provided they didn't reasonably discover the infringement more than three years before filing.

Excerpts:

“There are a lot of pseudo-splits where people will talk about there being circuit splits when there really aren’t,” said Aaron Moss. “This is a true, honest-to-goodness circuit split.”

Asked whether the United States Supreme Court may step in to resolve the conflict, he noted that the issue is a “little bit hyper-technical,” so the “question is whether it’s too insignificant in the overall scheme of things to make the Supreme Court’s docket.

Resources

• Bloomberg Law