Advanced Copyright Law on the Internet

1201(a)(2), which prohibits marketing a technology used in circumventing an access measure.
The court awarded statutory damages of $214,898,600, representing $200 for each of at least
1,074,493 receivers intended for piracy sold by the defendants.^951

(xvii) Adobe Systems v. Feather

In this case, the defendant offered for sale and distributed pirated copies of the plaintiffs’
software via the Internet, including on eBay and through his own website. He also trafficked in
and sold product keys or serial numbers designed to circumvent the plaintiffs’ copyright
protection measures to enable the pirated copies to function. Upon a motion for default
judgment, the court found that the defendant’s actions, as alleged in the complaint, established
violations of Section 1201(a)(2) and of willful copyright infringement. The court awarded
statutory damages for willful infringement under Section 504(c)(2) in the amount of $90,000 for
each of 28 copyrighted works infringed, for a total award of $2,520,000 in damages. The
plaintiffs did not seek separate damages for their DMCA claim, and the court noted in a footnote
that they could not do so in any event, citing other authority for the proposition that a plaintiff
cannot seek duplicative statutory damages under the Copyright Act and the DMCA.^952 Note that
the ruling with respect to “duplicative” statutory damages seems contrary to other cases, such as
the Pacific Stock v. MacArthur & Co. case discussed in Section G.1(c)(1)(xi) below, which
awarded statutory damages for CMI violations in addition to statutory damages for copyright
infringement arising out of the same acts.

(3) What Constitutes an Effective Technological Measure

(i) Auto Inspection Services v. Flint Auto Auction

In Auto Inspection Services v. Flint Auto Auction,^953 the plaintiff was the owner of an
automotive inspection program that provided a uniform method of inspecting vehicles after the
term of a lease or use had expired. The plaintiff included a quality control feature as part of the
program that allowed it to monitor all information collected using the program. For example,
when a vehicle inspector collected data for a vehicle and entered it into the program, the data had
to be sent to the plaintiff for quality control inspection before the information could be forwarded
to the owner of the vehicle. In this way, the plaintiff could monitor who was using the program
to protect against unauthorized use.^954

The defendant, a former licensee of the plaintiff’s program, wrote its own automotive
inspection program to replace the plaintiff’s program. The plaintiff claimed that the defendant’s
program was a copyright infringement. The plaintiff also claimed that its quality control feature
constituted a technical protection measure to restrict access and use of its software, and that the

(^951) Id. at 4-5, 8-11.
(^952) Adobe Sys v. Feather, 895 F. Supp. 2d 297, 301-02 & 303 n.5 (D. Conn. 2012).
(^953) 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 87366 (E.D. Mich. Dec. 4, 2006).
(^954) Id. at *1-2.