Fogerty V. Fantasy - Majority Opinion

Majority Opinion

The 1976 copyright act allows district courts in their discretion to award "a reasonable attorney's fee to the prevailing party as part of the costs" it may otherwise award. Fantasy pointed out that the Court had held that identical language in Title VII supported a similar double standard for awarding attorney's fees to prevailing parties in Title VII cases, with prevailing plaintiffs recovering as a matter of course and prevailing defendants not recovering. But the Court read the language in the analogous section of Title VII as evidence of Congress's decision to convert the civil rights plaintiff into a "private attorney general" who was enforcing the statutory scheme.

By contrast, the legislative history of the Copyright Act does not suggest that Congress intended to afford similar rights to persons whose copyrights have been infringed. Civil rights plaintiffs are frequently without means, whereas civil rights defendants are typically large companies. Awarding attorney's fees to prevailing plaintiffs but not prevailing defendants helps to redress this imbalance. The primary objective of the Copyright Act is to "encourage the production of original literary, artistic, and musical expression for the good of the public." Parties who seek to enforce their copyrights "run the gamut from corporate behemoths to starving artists," just as copyright defendants are equally likely to be wealthy or poor. Thus, there is less of a need to provide an economic incentive to individuals in order for there to be adequate enforcement of the copyright law.

Furthermore, preventing infringement is not the sole goal of the copyright law. To be sure, it is one goal, but it is not the only one, nor even the most important. "Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an author's creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good." For this reason, it is just as important to encourage the litigation of meritorious defenses to copyright as it is to encourage the litigation of infringement cases in the first place.

However, the fact that district courts have discretion to award attorney's fees does not mean that they should be awarding attorney's fees routinely. In the United States, unlike in the United Kingdom, parties typically bear their own costs of litigation. But the statute merely confers discretion on district courts to award attorney's fees, not a requirement that they do so in the typical copyright suit. If Congress had intended for attorney's fees to be virtually mandatory, it would have written the statute differently and studied it extensively in light of American practice.