Hines v. EMI April Music Inc.
- James Oetken
- 1:20-cv-03535
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 9
In Hines v. BMG, Judge Oetken denied Hines’s motion to reconsider summary judgment, ruling that late expert materials were properly excluded.
Ernie Hines’s request to revisit the earlier summary-judgment ruling was denied, leaving the court’s prior grants of summary judgment to the Warner Defendants and Ginuwine in place.
What happened
In Hines v. EMI April Music Inc., Ernie Hines asked the court to reconsider its earlier decisions granting summary judgment to the Warner Defendants and Ginuwine. He argued mainly that the court had wrongly excluded supplemental materials from Dr. Bennett.
The court denied the motion. It ruled that the request was too late under the court’s local reconsideration rule and that Hines had not met the requirements for relief under the federal rules governing changes to judgments and exceptional relief. The court also upheld its decision to exclude Dr. Bennett’s materials because they were submitted after the expert-disclosure and discovery deadlines.
Judge J. Paul Oetken concluded that Hines had not shown a clear error, unfairness requiring correction, new evidence, or another valid basis for changing the earlier judgment. The court directed the clerk to close the motion.
The detailed version
- Hines v. EMI April Music Inc. · No. 1:20-cv-03535
- James Oetken
- Jan. 10, 2024
Background
Ernie Hines brought a copyright-infringement lawsuit against W Chappell Music Corporation, artists known as Jay-Z and Timbaland, and the artist known as Ginuwine. The court previously granted summary judgment to the Warner Defendants and Ginuwine. Hines then moved for reconsideration under Local Civil Rule 6.3 and Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 59 and 60.
Local Rule 6.3
The court ruled that Hines could not proceed under Local Rule 6.3 alone because he served his motion 28 days after judgment was entered, while that rule generally requires service within 14 days. The court nevertheless considered the motion under Rules 59 and 60, which provide different timing periods.
Rule 59(e)
A motion under Rule 59(e), which allows a party to ask the court to alter or amend a judgment, requires a showing of an intervening change in controlling law, newly available evidence, or a clear error or manifest injustice. The court found that Hines showed none of these grounds.
Hines primarily argued that the court had erred by excluding supplemental materials from Dr. Bennett. The court rejected that argument. It explained that the materials were submitted after the expert-disclosure deadline of September 1, 2022, after the expert-discovery deadline of October 21, 2022, and months after the materials’ December 18, 2022 date. Hines filed them for the first time with his opposition to the summary-judgment motions on January 14, 2023.
The court applied the factors used to decide whether late disclosures should be excluded: the explanation for the delay, the importance of the evidence, prejudice to the opposing party, and the possibility of a continuance. It found that Hines repeated explanations the court had already considered, that the defendants would have been prejudiced because they relied on the completed discovery record, and that reopening discovery would cause additional delay. The court also stated that it would have reached the same conclusion even if it had considered Dr. Bennett’s supplemental materials.
The court rejected Hines’s alternative argument that the materials were timely rebuttal evidence under Rule 26(a)(2)(D)(ii). The court said the case’s scheduling order controlled and that, even under the rule’s default timing, the materials were not submitted within 30 days after the report Hines identified as the material being rebutted. The court also noted that Hines had not previously characterized the materials as a proper rebuttal report.
Rule 60
The court also denied relief under Rule 60. Rule 60(a) permits correction of clerical mistakes but does not permit changing an order to correct an alleged legal or factual error. Hines did not identify a clerical mistake. Rule 60(b) provides limited relief in exceptional circumstances, but the court found that Hines was seeking to relitigate an issue already decided and was relying on alleged legal error, which is not a substitute for an appeal.
Disposition
The court denied Hines’s motion to reconsider the court’s grant of the Warner Defendants’ and Ginuwine’s motions for summary judgment. It directed the clerk to close the motion at Docket Number 226.
Read the full 9-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.