Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
The Court ruled that judges deciding whether to award attorney's fees in copyright cases should give substantial weight to whether the losing side's legal position was reasonable, though that factor alone cannot control the decision.
Because the lower courts may have treated reasonableness as nearly automatic rather than just one important factor, the Court sent the case back so the trial judge could reconsider the textbook reseller's fee request under the correct standard.
“objective reasonableness can be only an important factor in assessing fee applications—not the controlling one”
The Court's central limit on how much weight reasonableness can carry in fee decisions.
How it got here: After winning his copyright case at the Supreme Court, the reseller sought fees; the trial court and Second Circuit denied a full award, and he asked the Supreme Court to review that fee ruling.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A student from Thailand studying in the U.S. resold textbooks that a publishing company sold much more cheaply abroad, importing and reselling them to American students at a profit. The publisher sued for copyright infringement, and after years of litigation, the student ultimately won at the Supreme Court and then asked the trial court to make the publisher pay his attorney's fees.
The question before the Court
When a copyright lawsuit ends, how much weight should a judge give to whether the losing side's argument was reasonable in deciding whether to award attorney's fees?
Why it matters
Authors, publishers, and people who use or resell copyrighted works will find it easier to predict whether they might have to pay — or could recover — attorney's fees after a copyright lawsuit. That predictability shapes whether people with strong legal claims are willing to sue or defend themselves, and whether those with weak positions back down early.
What changes now
The case returns to the trial court, which must reconsider the textbook reseller's request for attorney's fees using the standard the Supreme Court just laid out: giving substantial but not decisive weight to whether the publisher's litigating position was reasonable, while also weighing every other relevant circumstance. The Court did not say how the fee request should ultimately come out.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the textbook reseller should actually receive attorney's fees — it left that decision to the trial court on remand. It also did not adopt reasonableness as an automatic or presumptive bar to fee awards, cautioning lower courts against treating it as controlling.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The copyright fee-shifting law lets judges award attorney's fees to the winning side but doesn't specify how to decide when. The Court had previously said this discretion must still serve the copyright law's core goals of encouraging creative work while letting others build on it.
- The Court considered two competing approaches: giving heavy weight to whether the losing side's argument was objectively reasonable, versus giving special weight to whether the lawsuit helped clarify an important and unsettled area of copyright law.
- The reasonableness approach won out because it creates a clear incentive: people with strong legal positions are encouraged to fight for their rights since they're likely to collect fees, while people with weak positions are discouraged from litigating because they risk having to pay both sides' costs.
- The law-clarification approach, by contrast, offered no such reliable incentive, since raising the stakes of a close case could just as easily scare cautious parties away from litigating as encourage them, and courts have no good way to predict in the moment which cases will turn out to be legally significant.
- The Court concluded that reasonableness should carry substantial weight but never become the single deciding factor, since judges must still weigh other circumstances like misconduct or a pattern of overreaching legal claims.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc. (510 U. S. 517)
The Court builds on Fogerty's discretion-based framework and nonexclusive factors for copyright fee awards.