Page:Nealy v. Warner Chappell Music, Inc. (11th Cir. 2023).pdf/10

 relief. Moreover, if a plaintiff did not suffer damages in the three years preceding the lawsuit, there is likely no basis for a plaintiff to obtain injunctive relief. The harm is not ongoing and is unlikely to resume if it ceased long ago. And, although a copyright plaintiff may elect to recover statutory damages instead of actual damages and profits, id. § 504(c), those statutory damages would also be unavailable under the defendants’ reading of Petrella because they remedy harm resulting from past violations of the Copyright Act and are therefore retrospective relief. See Edelman v. Jordan, 415 U.S. 651, 668, 94 S.Ct. 1347, 39 L.Ed.2d 662 (1974) (explaining retrospective relief includes monetary compensation for “a past breach of a legal duty”). There is no escaping the conclusion that the defendants’ position would gut the discovery rule by eliminating any meaningful relief for timely claims, even though the Court expressly left open whether a discovery rule applies to copyright claims.

In short, the defendants’ reading of Petrella ignores the question presented, conflates the Court’s discussion of claim accrual under the injury rule with the availability of damages under the discovery rule, and cannot be squared with the Court’s express preservation of the discovery rule. For these reasons, we believe the Supreme Court in Petrella did not bar copyright damages in actions that are timely under the discovery rule.

Having established that Petrella itself does not impose a separate bar on retrospective relief for an otherwise timely copyright claim, we turn to the Copyright Act’s text to see if it supports such a bar. We conclude it does not.

The plain text of the Copyright Act’s statute of limitations does not limit the remedies available on an otherwise timely claim. The statute of limitations provides that “[n]o civil action shall be maintained under the provisions of this title unless it is commenced within three years after the claim accrued.” 17 U.S.C. § 507(b). A civil action is a proceeding “brought to enforce, redress, or protect a private right or civil right.” Action, Black’s Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019). A remedy, on the other hand, is “[t]he means of enforcing a right or preventing or redressing a wrong.” Remedy, Black’s Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019). A plaintiff cannot obtain a remedy without a timely civil action. But, if a plaintiff succeeds at maintaining a timely civil action, the inapplicable time-bar has little bearing on what a plaintiff may obtain as a remedy.

The Copyright Act'’s damages provisions do not place a three-year limitation on the recovery of damages for past infringement. For a separate damages bar to exist, these damages provisions would have to limit a plaintiff’s recovery to something less than the harm caused by the infringement for which a defendant is liable. But they do not. Instead, the Copyright Act makes “an infringer of a copyright” liable for “the copyright owner’s actual damages and any additional profits of the infringer.” 17 U.S.C. § 504(a)(1). “Actual damages” are defined as “the actual damages suffered by [the plaintiff] as a result of the infringement.” Id. § 504(b). There is no bar to damages in a timely action.

Given that the plain text of the Copyright Act does not support the existence of a separate damages bar for an otherwise timely copyright claim, we hold that a copyright plaintiff with a timely claim under the discovery rule may recover retrospective relief for infringement that occurred more than three years prior to the filing of the lawsuit.

The district court certified the question of whether “damages in this copyright