Three years ago, a Thai student who had helped finance his American education by selling imported textbooks won a major Supreme Court victory, persuading the justices that it is lawful to buy copyrighted books abroad and resell them in the U.S., the New York Times reported today. The ruling, which clarified an ambiguous phrase in the Copyright Act, applied to all manner of products, including books, records, art and software. The student, Supap Kirtsaeng, returned to the Supreme Court on Monday, seeking more than $2 million in legal fees from John Wiley & Sons, the publisher that had sued him. The usual rule in American civil litigation is that each side pays its own lawyers regardless of who wins. But the Copyright Act allows judges to “award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party.” Federal appeals courts apply different standards in deciding when fee awards in copyright cases are warranted. The judge in Mr. Kirtsaeng’s case, in New York, awarded him nothing, relying on a decision from the federal appeals court there that focused on whether the losing side’s position had been “objectively reasonable.” The publisher easily met that standard, the judge said, as it had won a $600,000 judgment against Kirtsaeng, won an appeal and lost in the Supreme Court by a 6-to-3 vote.
