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SFC: First Update on the Vizio lawsuit

 3 years ago
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SFC: First Update on the Vizio lawsuit

Posted Dec 1, 2021 19:11 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

Just to clarify this for people who don't know much about US law:

* The US court system is divided between state courts and federal courts. For the most part, these are two entirely separate systems, except that you can (try to) appeal from the highest court in a state to the US Supreme Court, if you think the state court's decision conflicts with the US Constitution or a federal law.
* Federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. They can only hear cases which the Constitution and/or federal statutes explicitly empower them to hear.
* State courts are courts of general jurisdiction. They can (for the most part) hear any case under the sun, so long as it in some way arises under or relates to their state's law (including common law). In particular, they can hear the vast majority of contract law cases.
* Under the US Constitution, federal law takes supremacy over ("preempts") state law where they conflict. You can't litigate a case under state law if that area of law has been preempted by federal law.
* If a claim arises under federal law, then the federal courts have jurisdiction to hear it, and state courts don't. There's also a thing called "diversity jurisdiction" where federal courts can hear state law claims, but that's probably not relevant here (or else Vizio would certainly have raised it as an argument in their filing, which they didn't as far as I can tell).
* In the US, copyright law is almost entirely federal. In an extremely small set of cases (not this one), you might be able to raise claims under state common law copyright, but this is usually only applicable to sound recordings made before 1972 or so.
* If a case is filed in state court, but the defendant believes that a federal court has jurisdiction over it, the defendant can "remove" it to federal court. The plaintiff may then try to have it "remanded" (sent) back to state court by arguing that the removal was improper.

The key paragraphs in Vizio's filing are as follows:

> Second, “[a] right is equivalent to rights within the exclusive province of copyright when it is infringed by the mere act of reproducing, performing, distributing, or displaying the work at issue.” Fleet v. CBS, Inc., 50 Cal. App. 4th 1911, 1918–24 (1996). Here, each claim is completely preempted by the Copyright Act because each alleges violations of the exact same exclusive federal rights protected by copyright law, namely, the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and make derivative copies of the copyrighted computer programs or source code.
>
> Although plaintiff asserts claims against VIZIO under the guise of a breach of contract claim, that claim is based solely on rights that are qualitatively equivalent to those protected by federal copyright law. It is well established that exceeding the scope of a license by violating its “conditions” gives rise to a claim for copyright infringement. See, e.g., MDY Indus., LLC v. Blizzard Ent., Inc., 629 F.3d 928, 939 (9th Cir. 2011) (“[w]e refer to contractual terms that limit a license’s scope as ‘conditions,’ the breach of which constitute copyright infringement”); [snip additional citations]

A couple of other notes:

* Vizio's filing does not explicitly state that they think the SFC should not have any third-party beneficiary rights.
* However, this is a valid inference for the SFC to make, because (in general) only the copyright holder can file a copyright infringement suit. If the case is litigated solely under a theory of copyright infringement, then the SFC probably loses automatically.
* The SFC's press release makes much of the fact that Vizio never denies violating the GPL. However, we're not at that stage of the litigation yet. If you're still litigating procedure, you are not required to make a substantive defense yet. It's still entirely possible that Vizio will later turn around and make some sort of non-infringement, de minimis, etc. argument. But I'm somewhat skeptical that they will actually do this, because it sounds like the SFC has them dead to rights on the GPL violation itself.


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