Plaintiff Torpedoed With Attorneys' Fees For "Objectively Unreasonable" Copyright Claim

In a recent decision from the District of Connecticut, Judge Meyer awarded attorneys' fees against a plaintiff who the court found brought an "objectively unreasonable" copyright infringement claim based on an unpublished work of non-fiction.

Plaintiff Joseph Leary's 2013 action alleged that a book written by defendants Roy Manstan ("Manstan") and Frederic Frese ("Frese"), and published by Westholm Publishing, LLC, infringed plaintiff's manuscript about a Revolutionary War-era submarine called the "Turtle." According to the Court's earlier summary judgment order, reported by us here, plaintiff and Frese worked together in the 1970s to create a replica of the "Turtle," and in the intervening decades plaintiff drafted a manuscript "weaving together a biography of Bushnell [the original builder of the sub], historical information about the Turtle, and plaintiff's own experience building a replica of the Turtle."