Page:Nealy v. Warner Chappell Music, Inc. (11th Cir. 2023).pdf/5

 MSI and Nealy’s legal consultant Jonathan Black met briefly with Crane and his lawyers in June 2008 to discuss Crane’s use of the MSI catalog. But nothing came of that meeting. Nealy recalled “letting them know that [he] was home [from prison] and that they had [his] music.” But he also “didn’t know what to do.” And so, he took no further action before returning to prison in 2012 to serve another sentence, which he completed in the fall of 2015.

Before Nealy returned to prison, litigation over the rights to the works ensued between Crane’s companies, Atlantic, Artist, Warner, Butler, and 321. But Nealy was not a party to this litigation and contends he did not learn of it until after serving his second prison sentence. Once he returned to prison, Nealy again did not have any involvement in the music industry.

Nealy alleges that he did not know and should not have reasonably known about the defendants’ violations of his ownership rights until sometime around the beginning of 2016. After Nealy finished serving his second sentence, a former MSI associate told Nealy about the litigation and Butler’s purported transfers of the rights to the musical works in January 2016. And then nearly three years later, on December 28, 2018, MSI and Nealy finally filed this lawsuit.

MSI and Nealy alleged that Atlantic, Artist, and Warner infringed their copyrights to several music works in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 501. MSI and Nealy sought relief for infringement they alleged occurred as early as 2008—ten years before they filed this lawsuit. The parties entered a joint-pretrial stipulation in which they agreed “that this case presents an ‘ownership dispute’ within the meaning of the statute of limitations for copyright claims.” After discovery, the defendants moved for summary judgment on all claims, which the district court granted in part and denied in part.

One issue the district court addressed at summary judgment was the timeliness of MSI and Nealy’s claims. A three-year statute of limitations governs claims under the Copyright Act, which runs from the time the claim accrues. 17 U.S.C. § 507(b). Because the parties agreed that the only disputed substantive issue relating to MSI and Nealy’s claims was whether MSI and Nealy owned the copyrights, the district court ruled that their claims accrued “when [MSI and Nealy] knew or should have known that [the defendants] were challenging their ownership to the [works].” Determining that a genuine dispute of material fact existed about when accrual occurred, the district court denied summary judgment for the defendants on statute of limitations grounds.

In a separate order, the district court certified for interlocutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b) the question whether “damages in this copyright action are limited to the three-year lookback period as calculated from the date of the filing of the Complaint pursuant to the Copyright Act and Petrella.” MSI and Nealy timely filed a petition to appeal from the certified order, which we granted, resulting in this interlocutory appeal.

Nealy and MSI also attempted to appeal from the district court’s partial final judgment in favor of Atlantic, but we dismissed that appeal for lack of jurisdiction. We also exercised our discretion under Section 1292(b) to limit the issues in this appeal to the district court’s certified question. It is to that question that we now turn.

We review legal questions, including the interpretation of federal statutes such as the Copyright Act and its statute of limitations, de novo. See Stansell v.