Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03099/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03099-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 820
Nature of Suit: Copyright
Cause of Action: 

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In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-3099

RICHARD BELL,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

CAMERON TAYLOR, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division.

No. 1:13-cv-798 — Tanya W. Pratt, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED APRIL 1, 2015 — DECIDED JUNE 29, 2015

____________________

Before WOOD, Chief Judge, FLAUM, Circuit Judge, and

KENNELLY, District Judge.*

FLAUM, Circuit Judge. Richard Bell sued various defendants for copyright infringement, accusing each of 

impermissibly displaying a photo that he owns on web-

* The Honorable Matthew F. Kennelly, United States District Judge 

for the Northern District of Illinois, sitting by designation.

 

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sites promoting their respective businesses. Bell’s complaint sought both damages and an injunction prohibiting future use of the photo. The defendants moved for 

summary judgment on the damages issue, arguing that 

Bell cannot demonstrate how they caused him financial 

harm and, thus, that he is not entitled to monetary recovery. The district court granted the motion, and Bell appealed. In addition to the summary judgment ruling, Bell 

contests the district court’s denial of two motions to compel and a motion seeking leave to file a fourth amended 

complaint. 

We have no jurisdiction to decide these issues. Although the court purported to issue a “final judgment” 

after ruling on the defendants’ summary judgment motion, it did so in error; the issue of injunctive relief was 

never adjudicated. Because Bell’s copyright claim was not 

entirely disposed of by the district court’s summary 

judgment ruling, the judgment—by definition—was not 

final. Accordingly, an appeal in this case is premature until the district court resolves Bell’s outstanding claims for 

injunctive relief.

I. Background

Richard Bell, a lawyer and photographer, alleges that 

three small Indianapolis business owners (and the small 

businesses of two of those three defendants), violated 

federal copyright laws (and an Indiana theft statute) by 

publishing on the internet a photo that he took of the Indianapolis skyline without his authorization. Defendant 

Fred O’Brien has an insurance business (co-defendant 

Insurance Concepts) and, for a few weeks in 2011, operated a website (www.insuranceconceptsfinancial.com), 

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where he allegedly displayed the photo. Defendant Cameron Taylor operates a computer business (co-defendant 

Taylor Computer Solutions), which he advertises on the 

web at www.taylorcomputersolutions.com. Bell alleges 

that he used the photo between January 2009 and April 

14, 2011. Defendant Shanna Cheatham is a real estate 

agent, who marketed her services at 

www.shannasells.com. Bell alleges that her site displayed 

his photo between June 2008 and June 15, 2011. Bell attached his photo to the (operative) third amended complaint, which sought both monetary damages and injunctive relief. 

In August 2013, the district court set a deadline for filing motions for leave to amend the pleadings. Nevertheless, Bell sought to amend his complaint (for a fourth 

time) nearly eight months after the cut-off. The impetus 

for Bell’s motion to amend was his realization that defendant Taylor had not actually used the photo at issue (a 

photo of Indianapolis’s skyline during the daytime); rather, Taylor’s website displayed a different photo belonging to Bell—one depicting Indianapolis’s skyline at night. 

Although motions for leave to amend are to be granted 

liberally, the district court denied Bell’s motion, citing 

undue delay and his own carelessness as grounds for the 

ruling. 

On May 2, 2014, the defendants filed a motion for 

summary judgment. In it, they argued that defendant 

Taylor was entitled to summary judgment, because she 

never displayed the photo about which Bell complained.

And, as to all defendants, they argued that Bell was not 

entitled to damages; “even in the event [Bell] is able to 

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establish ownership of the photo in question ... he is not 

entitled to economic damages based upon applicable law 

and the facts of this case,” they contended. The defendants moved to dismiss the state law claim on preemption 

grounds. 

The district court concluded that, although Bell had 

established ownership of the photo, he was not entitled 

to damages. In the court’s view, Bell failed to demonstrate 

that the defendants profited from their misuse of his photo. And, though the court agreed that Bell was entitled to

damages equal to the photo’s fair market value, it

deemed his affidavit representing its value ($200) as insufficient proof. It also agreed that Bell’s state claims 

were preempted, and so it granted the defendants’ summary judgment motion in full.

In doing so, the court also denied an outstanding motion to compel that Bell had filed earlier in the case. In 

that motion, Bell sought spreadsheets that defendant 

Cheatham’s expert had used in the creation of a table she 

made displaying the web traffic that Cheatham’s site received before, during, and after the period in which she 

displayed Bell’s photo. Earlier in the proceedings, the district court also had denied Bell’s request for tax returns 

from each defendant for every year from 2000 to 2011, 

which Bell hoped would show that the defendants’ profits increased during the periods in which their websites 

displayed Bell’s photo. 

On the day the court ruled on the defendants’ summary judgment motion, it also entered what was labeled 

“Final Judgment,” purporting to dispose of the case in 

the defendants’ favor. Bell then appealed, arguing that

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No. 14-3099 5

the district court made a multitude of errors. First, he 

charges the district judge with improperly denying his 

two motions to compel, unfairly impeding his ability to 

prove an entitlement to monetary damages. Second, Bell 

contends that, even setting aside the court’s discovery 

ruling, it erroneously granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants on the damages issue. Third, he

claims that the district court improperly denied his motion for leave to amend his complaint for the fourth time 

in order to correct his photo identification error with respect to Taylor. Finally, Bell asserts that the court inappropriately entered final judgment in this case, as the defendants’ summary judgment motion (and the court’s 

ruling on it) only pertained to Bell’s claim to monetary 

relief; Bell’s request for an injunction was never addressed.

II. Discussion

We begin, and end, with the issue of appellate jurisdiction, because—as it turns out—we have none here. 

Having reviewed the defendants’ summary judgment 

motion and the district court’s opinion, Bell is correct: the 

court did not resolve his claims for injunctive relief. As 

such, the district court’s ruling was not final, and Bell’s 

appeal is premature. 

In their motion for summary judgment, the defendants made clear that they were moving for judgment only 

as to the issue of damages. Indeed, they captioned their 

brief in support of their summary judgment motion as a 

“Motion for Partial Summary Judgment as to Damages 

and Preemption.” And the district court acknowledged 

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as much in its opinion, noting that the “Defendants ... 

rest their motion for summary judgment on the premise 

that Mr. Bell cannot establish actual damages or indirect 

profits.” Bell v. Taylor, No. 13-cv-798, 2014 WL 4250110, at 

*4 (S.D. Ind. Aug. 26, 2014). For that reason, the district 

court’s opinion did not decide whether Bell’s claims warrant injunctive relief. See id. at *4–5 (rejecting plaintiff’s 

damages theories). 

Yet Bell sought both damages and an injunction

against the defendants. So, despite the court’s ruling, 

Bell’s copyright claim was still alive. Indeed, “[t]he existence of damages suffered is not an essential element of a 

claim for copyright infringement.” Davis v. The Gap, Inc., 

246 F.3d 152, 158 (2d Cir. 2001) (vacating a grant of summary judgment for defendants on a copyright claim, 

where the district court neglected to resolve plaintiff’s 

request for declaratory relief). The case, therefore, was 

not over. The judge, however, seemed to overlook that 

Bell’s complaint also requested injunctive relief, and so—

the same day she issued her decision on the defendants’ 

motion for summary judgment—she also entered what 

purported to constitute a final judgment in the case. It 

read: “Having this day granted summary judgment in 

favor of Defendants, the Court hereby enters 

JUDGMENT in favor of Defendants and against the 

Plaintiff. Plaintiff shall take nothing by way of his complaint.” This was done in error, because every issue had 

not been resolved.

Bell declined to bring the error to Judge Pratt’s attention. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(a) provides: “The 

court may correct a clerical mistake or a mistake arising 

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from oversight or omission whenever one is found in a 

judgment, order, or other part of the record. The court 

may do so on motion or on its own, with or without notice.” And Rule 60(b) makes clear that “[o]n motion and 

just terms, the court may relieve a party or its legal representative from a final judgment, order, or proceeding for 

the following reasons: (1) mistake, inadvertence, surprise, 

or excusable neglect; ... (6) any other reason that justifies 

relief.” Rule 59(e) permits “motion[s] to alter or amend a 

judgment,” requiring that such a motion be filed within 

28 days of the judgment’s entry. Because the district 

judge mistakenly believed that she had entered a proper 

final judgment, it seems that a motion brought under any

of these rules would have sufficed to alert her that Bell’s 

claims had not been resolved in full, and thus that the 

final judgment had been entered erroneously. Yet Bell 

filed no motion.

Instead, Bell sought appellate review, filing a notice of 

appeal, and asking us to review (as detailed above) various rulings made by the district judge. However, 28 

U.S.C. § 1291 grants us “jurisdiction of appeals from all 

final decisions of the district courts of the United States.”

And a decision is not final “unless it ends the litigation 

on the merits.” Cunningham v. Hamilton County, 527 U.S. 

198, 204 (1999). In other words, “[a] district court’s decision is final when only ministerial details remain.” Manley v. City of Chicago, 236 F.3d 392, 395 (7th Cir. 2001). 

That clearly is not the case here, as the issue of injunctive 

relief remains undecided. 

Moreover, the order entered by the district court purporting to be a “final judgment” is of no consequence. As 

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we have said, “a district court’s label cannot convert an 

otherwise non-final judgment into a final judgment.” Dubicz v. Commonwealth Edison Co., 377 F.3d 787, 792 (7th 

Cir. 2004). “A district court’s decision is a final judgment 

only when the decision meets the requirements for being 

a final judgment.” Id. at 791. Here, those requirements 

were not met. Accordingly, we have no jurisdiction to 

decide the issues presented by Bell in this appeal.1

III. Conclusion

For the foregoing reasons, we DISMISS this appeal for 

lack of jurisdiction and REMAND to the district court for 

resolution of the outstanding issues identified in this 

opinion.

1 The defendants argue that “in the event [we] affirm[] the district 

court’s summary judgment ruling, the issue of declaratory relief becomes moot,” because the photos have been removed from their respective websites. Setting aside the defendants’ overly simplistic 

view of mootness, see e.g., Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl.

Servs. (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 189 (2000) (discussing the “stringent” 

test for proving mootness in the face of voluntary cessation), we 

need not—in fact, we cannot—address the merits of that position in 

the absence of a final judgment.

 

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