Rimini Street, Inc. v. Oracle USA, Inc.

Rimini Street v. Oracle USA, decided March 4th, 2019. A unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, reversed the Ninth Circuit in relevant part and held that the term "full costs" in the Copyright Act's cost-shifting provision authorizes a court to award only the categories of costs listed in the general federal costs statutes. "Full" describes how much of those costs a court may shift — not what kinds of expenses. Here's the brief.

Oracle develops and licenses software and sells maintenance services for it. Rimini Street sells third-party software maintenance services to Oracle's customers, competing with Oracle's own support business. Oracle sued Rimini and its chief executive in federal district court in Nevada, alleging that Rimini copied Oracle's software without a license in the course of providing that support.

A jury found that Rimini had infringed various Oracle copyrights and that the defendants had violated California and Nevada computer-access statutes. It awarded Oracle roughly $35.6 million for copyright infringement and $14.4 million on the state-law claims. After judgment, the district court ordered the defendants to pay an additional $28.5 million in attorney's fees and about $4.95 million in costs — later reduced to $3.4 million. The court also ordered Rimini to pay $12.8 million for litigation expenses such as expert witnesses, e-discovery, and jury consulting.

That $12.8 million award was the sole issue at the Court. The Ninth Circuit acknowledged the expenses fell outside the six statutory categories, but affirmed anyway, reasoning that the Copyright Act's grant of "full costs" reached further.

The Copyright Act provides that a district court, in its discretion, may allow the recovery of "full costs" by or against any party. Section 505.

The general costs statutes — sections 1821 and 1920 of Title 28 — define what "costs" a federal court may award, listing six categories: clerk and marshal fees, transcript fees, printing and witness fees, copying costs, docket fees, and compensation of court-appointed experts and interpreters. The Court described these statutes as a default rule and a clear baseline. Under precedents like Crawford Fitting, a statute that simply refers to "costs" reaches only those six categories; to authorize expenses beyond them — expert fees, for instance — Congress must say so explicitly. The question was whether "full costs" in section 505 supplies that explicit authorization.

It does not.

The Court began with the six categories. Congress has enacted more than 200 statutes that expressly authorize cost awards, and some go beyond the general statute to reach expert or attorney's fees. The Copyright Act does expressly provide for attorney's fees, but it does not explicitly authorize expenses beyond the six categories. And sections 1821 and 1920 do not reach expert-witness fees, e-discovery expenses, or jury-consultant fees — the very items in Oracle's $12.8 million award. Under the Court's settled approach, those six categories set the ceiling on what a court may shift as costs, and only an explicit statutory instruction lifts it.

The word "full" did not change that result. "Full," the Court explained, is a term of quantity or amount — an adjective describing the completeness of the costs award, not the kinds of expenses it may include.

A "full moon" means the moon, not Mars; a "full breakfast" means breakfast, not lunch. So "full costs" means costs, not other expenses. The Court rejected Oracle's three counterarguments — that "full" must add something, that "full costs" was a historical term of art sweeping in all litigation expenses, and that reading "full" narrowly rendered it surplusage. None overcame the default rule that costs statutes reach only the enumerated categories absent explicit language expanding them.

Rimini Street resolved a split in the courts of appeals over the reach of "full costs" in section 505. The rule is straightforward: a copyright litigant's recoverable "costs" are the ordinary taxable ones defined by sections 1821 and 1920 — nothing more. Expert witnesses, e-discovery vendors, and jury consultants may drive the real expense of copyright litigation, but they are not "costs" a court may shift under the Act. The holding displaced the Ninth Circuit's broader reading, under which "full costs" had reached beyond the taxable categories since 2005. And the decision reaffirmed the broader interpretive principle: "costs" means the six categories unless a statute explicitly says otherwise.

Rimini Street, Inc. v. Oracle USA, Inc., 586 U.S. 334, decided March 4th, 2019. I'm Kyle Coleman. Thanks for watching.