Here in the Cashman Law Firm’s Federal Computer Crimes blog, we have been addressing a number of issues with regard to federal copyright law and its application to lawsuits dealing with the illegal downloading of movies and songs using the bittorrent protocol.
In our article entitled, “20th Century Fox v. small screenwriter. Suing for copyright infringement appears to be cheaper than advertising.” I mentioned that if the defendant (McIlvaine) is found guilty, she will likely need to file for bankruptcy to discharge her judgment because it is unlikely that if 20th Century Fox prevails in getting their $12 Million in copyright violation damages, McIlvaine will be able to pay it. As a response to my posting, a reader posited that “debts incurred for causing willful and malicious injuries are not dischargeable in bankruptcy,” referring to 11 U.S.C. s.523(a)(6).
The old Supreme Court case describing this issue was Tinker v. Colwell, 193 U.S. 473 (1904). However since that case, the law has been modified and in Kawaauhau v. Geiger, 118 S. Ct. 974 (1998), the Court limited the meaning of “willful and malicious injuries” to intentional torts, e.g., a doctor prescribing the wrong medication causing the patient’s infection to spread and ultimately to have the foot amputated. Thus, since copyright infringement is not one of the intentional torts, the rule preventing discharge for “willful and malicious injuries” would not include copyright infringement.
[Obviously this is not meant to constitute legal advice and one doing research on this topic should consult an attorney before proceeding. If I were to represent McIlvaine in her copyright lawsuit in New York, I would obviously update the case law with more recent cases of that district to confirm and strengthen what I have written above.]