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Attorney Fees Update

By Stan Soocher
April 01, 2004

Copyright Fair Use; Sec. 505

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a follow-up decision to its recent ruling awarding attorney fees and costs to media defendants that won a suit over use of film clips of actor Robert Mitchum in news obituaries. Video-Cinema Films Inc. v. CBS Corp., 98-7130. The court had asked CBS to provide an estimate of the actual imputed costs of using in-house counsel to defend CBS. In the latest fee decision, the district court accepted $154.99 as a reasonable hourly rate, based on in-house counsel's education and experience. The court multiplied that rate by 70.1 hours for a total of $10,864.80 in attorney fees. The court then granted an award for in-house counsel work for which CBS kept no contemporaneous records. The court agreed that the network would otherwise be “undercompensated for the reasonable value of its work.” But, as it had done with the ABC network in its previous fee ruling, the court reduced CBS's request 25%, from $50,000 to $37,500 for failure to keep sufficient contemporaneous records.

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