Have trouble getting management interested in getting your company’s intellectual property house in order? You might want to slip in a reminder that they could be held personally liable for IP issues as a recent article by Cydney Tune and Jenny Yoo of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP points out:
"A hotel was liable for statutory damages, the other copyright owners’ costs of suit including attorneys’ fees, and was permanently enjoined from infringing copyrights to music compositions by publicly performing the music for hotel patrons. Most significantly, the President/Treasurer of the hotel’s parent company was found to be jointly and severally liable with the hotel for copyright infringement. EMI Mills Music, Inc., et al., v. Empress Hotel, Inc., et al. (D.P.R. No. 03-01940, Sept. 20, 2006).
…a corporate officer may be held to be jointly and severally liable when he or she:
* personally participated in the actual infringement;
* derived financial benefit from the infringing activities as either a major shareholder in the corporation, or through some other means such as receiving a percentage of the revenues from the activity giving rise to the infringement;
* used the corporation as an instrument to carry out a deliberate infringement of copyright;
* was the dominant influence in the corporation, and determined the policies which resulted in the infringement, or
* on the basis of some combination of the above criteria."
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