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December 4, 2011

No Presumption of Irreparable Harm in False Advertising Cases Either

Irreparable injury cannot be presumed in Lanham Act false advertising cases. That was the ruling in Leatherman Tool v. Coast Cutlery, a case decided in October in the District of Oregon. In that case the court found that Leatherman made a preliminary showing that its competitor, Coast Cutlery, deliberately included in advertising literally false statements concerning the sharpness of its knife blades. The court did not issue a preliminary injunction, however, because it found Leatherman’s affidavits avowing concern that sales would be diverted were speculative, and insufficient to prove that Leatherman would be irreparably harmed by its competitor’s literally false advertising.

On the heels of cases within the past five years expressly ruling a presumption of irreparable harm does not apply in patent and copyright cases,  a recent decision from the First Circuit in a trademark case and a one from the District of Arizona concerning another Lanham Act case, it is now seems likely, to the extent it was not after the Supreme Court’s decision in Ebay, that  the days in which plaintiffs can count on a presumption of irreparable harm in an IP case of any type may be numbered.

The challenge now, for intellectual property owners, scrupulous advertisers and courts, is to prevent us from sliding into a culture of infringe now, pay later. Infringers will no doubt in every case assert that irreparable harm cannot be proven because the wrongdoing can be remedied by payment of damages, in the form of a license fee or, in the case of false advertisers and trademark infringers, payments for proven diverted sales. That leaves the plaintiff with a difficult task to prove otherwise, the danger the presumption of irreparable harm was designed to prevent. And so the battle lines are re-drawn.