Property, intangible

The district court did not err by granting summary judgment in favor of Coca-Cola because the record establishes without dispute that Vergara assigned his copyright interest to Universal…. Vergara stated in his email on March 4, 2009, that his “only demand” to assign his copyright interest was that he receive credit as the adapter and producer. Puig [A representative for Coca-Cola] “unconditionally accepted” that condition in his email on March 5, 2009, in which he told Vergara to “count on the credits on the track.” Puig’s acceptance on behalf of Universal was effective to create a contract with Vergara because it “match[ed] the terms of [his] offer.”  The two emails were “so connected with each other that they may be fairly said to constitute a complete contract.” That Vergara and Universal intended to execute a “subsequent formal, written contract, does not denote that they did not intend to be bound immediately by their written negotiations.” Their emails do not contain any language from which “conflicting legal inferences could be drawn regarding the expressed intent of the parties so as to alter the legal effect of the undisputed facts of an offer by Vergara, acceptance, and communication of that acceptance” by Puig.

To add insult to injury for Vergara, the district court has awarded Coca-Cola partial attorneys’ fees and costs to the tune of $578,146.99. Vergara had argued that “the issue of whether an email constitutes a signed writing for purposes of the Copyright Act was not previously addressed by the Eleventh Circuit or its District Courts” and therefore his claim was well-founded.  Summarizing the law, the magistrate disagreed and held that the argument was objectively unreasonable:

Taking all this into account (Eleventh Circuit precedent linking the § 204(a) to state statutes of frauds, Vergara’s own assertion that state law governs the interpretation of copyright contracts, the ruling in this District that signed emails satisfies the Florida statute of frauds, a Florida statute specifically stating that electronic signatures have the same force as written signatures, a Florida case stating that a memorandum may take almost any possible form in order to satisfy the statute of frauds, and the text of the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act) Vergara’s entitlement defense crumbles. It is neither objective nor reasonable for Vergara to have believed, despite the fact that a case on this extremely specific issue had not appeared before a court in this District, that any court in this District would rule any other way than that his email assignment of copyright interest was valid. Vergara in no way “took a reasonable stand on an unsettled principle of law.”