A federal judge played down his decision in an earlier case, reje...

actual damages plus profits instead of statutory damages. YouTube argued that the Copyright Act allows only statutory damages. Judge Louis Stanton in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan agreed, citing Supreme Court precedent. He had to give short shrift to his own 2005 decision in Blanch v. Koons, which Viacom cited in support of its motion. In that case a photographer sued artist Jeff Koons for infringing her work. Stanton rejected Andrea Blanch’s statutory claims because the infringed photo wasn’t registered with the Copyright Office before Koons used it, and Blanch couldn’t show actual damages. But because both the district and appeals courts found Koons’ improper use of others’ works willful and repeated, “I gave Blanch the opportunity to argue, on the facts, that such an apparently anomalous result was not required by the law,” and let her amend her complaint to “prove malice and raise squarely the question whether punitive damages are available to her,” Stanton said. “If it ever was, that decision is no longer good law,” he said, citing district court decisions and the leading treatise on copyright law, which called the Blanch ruling a “rogue” ruling and “contrary to existing precedent.” Those authorities also criticized Stanton’s upholding of a jury award of punitive damages in a 2003 case, TVT v. Island Def Jam, resulting in a $132 million judgment for reneging on a recording deal, he said. Stanton used TVT as the basis for allowing Blanch’s amended complaint. He said Viacom has no shortage of legal remedies against YouTube -- statutory willfulness damages, based on timely registration of Viacom’s works and the expected identification of them during discovery.