Technical LED Intellectual Property, LLC v. BVGA Mipow Co., Ltd
- Susan Illston
- 3:19-cv-00393
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
In Technical LED v. BVGA, Judge Illston denied without prejudice a motion to seal evidence supporting a default-judgment request.
Technical LED Intellectual Property, LLC had to serve the order and properly file the materials; Amazon and Best Buy could seek sealing of their information; BVGA Mipow was affected because the materials included information about it and its alleged products.
What happened
Technical LED Intellectual Property, LLC asked to keep evidence supporting its request for default judgment out of the public record. The evidence included sales information produced by Amazon and Best Buy and settlement agreements with other alleged infringers.
The court said documents tied to the claims could be sealed only for compelling reasons and that sealing requests must be narrowly limited. Confidentiality designations by Amazon and Best Buy, without more, were not enough. The court denied the motion without prejudice for the sales documents, allowing Amazon or Best Buy to file their own sealing motions, and separately denied without prejudice the request covering an inaccessible settlement-agreement exhibit.
Technical LED had to serve the order on Amazon and Best Buy and file proof of service. Judge Illston also directed Technical LED to properly file the spreadsheets and allowed it to renew the request for the settlement-agreement exhibit with an accessible copy.
The detailed version
- Technical LED Intellectual Property, LLC v. BVGA Mipow Co., Ltd · No. 3:19-cv-00393
- Susan Illston
- Mar. 17, 2020
Background
Technical LED filed an administrative motion to seal supplemental evidence supporting its motion for default judgment. The materials included information about BVGA Mipow (USA) Co. Ltd. and sales figures for the allegedly infringing smartbulb products sold by Amazon and Best Buy. They also included confidential settlement agreements between Technical LED and other alleged infringers.
Court’s analysis
The court explained that documents more than tangentially related to the underlying claims—including documents offered to prove damages—may be sealed only for “compelling reasons.” A sealing request must also be narrowly tailored, which may require redacting specific information rather than sealing entire documents.
For most of the documents, Technical LED’s attorney relied on Amazon’s and Best Buy’s designations of the materials as confidential. The court held that a private confidentiality designation, by itself, did not establish compelling reasons to overcome the public’s right of access to court records. The court also found no apparent threat of harm from the information, which concerned BVGA’s information and relatively small sales figures for the products at issue.
Ruling and instructions
The court denied, without prejudice, the motion to seal the documents concerning Amazon’s and Best Buy’s sales information. The court allowed Amazon or Best Buy to file their own motions to seal by March 31, 2020. If neither retailer filed such a motion, Technical LED was ordered to file the documents publicly by April 7, 2020.
The court ordered Technical LED to serve Amazon and Best Buy with a copy of the order by March 24, 2020, and to file proof of service. It also noted that certain Excel spreadsheets had been delivered to chambers on a thumb drive rather than properly filed. Technical LED was instructed to follow the local rule for manually filing documents that could not be filed electronically.
As to Exhibit 1-O, containing Technical LED’s settlement agreements, the court denied, without prejudice, the sealing request because the filed PDF could not be opened and therefore had not been effectively filed. The court allowed Technical LED to file a renewed motion with an accessible copy by March 31, 2020.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.