Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-1501_8n5a.pdf
Page Number: 12.0

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

9 

Opinion of the Court 

Court had developed the rule that a plaintiff may “recover 
the amount of . . . profits that the defendants have made by 
the use of his invention” through “a series of decisions un-
der the patent act of 1836, which simply conferred upon the 
courts of the United States general equity jurisdiction . . . 
in  cases  arising  under  the  patent  laws.”    Tilghman,  125 
U. S., at 144.  The 1836 statute, in turn, incorporated the 
substance  of  an  earlier  statute  from  1819  which  granted
courts  the  ability  to  “proceed  according  to  the  course  and 
principles  of  courts  of  equity”  to  “prevent  the  violation  of 
patent-rights.”  Root, 105 U. S., at 193.  Thus, as these cases 
demonstrate,  equity  courts  habitually  awarded  profits-
based remedies in patent cases well before Congress explic-
itly authorized that form of relief. 

B 
While equity courts did not limit profits remedies to par-
ticular  types  of  cases,  they  did  circumscribe  the  award  in
multiple ways to avoid transforming it into a penalty out-
side their equitable powers.  See Marshall, 15 Wall., at 149. 
For one, the profits remedy often imposed a constructive
trust on wrongful gains for wronged victims.  The remedy
itself thus converted the wrongdoer, who in many cases was 
an  infringer,  “into  a  trustee,  as  to  those  profits,  for  the
owner of the patent which he infringes.”  Burdell v. Denig, 
92 U. S. 716, 720 (1876).  In “converting the infringer into a
trustee for the patentee as regards the profits thus made,”
the chancellor “estimat[es] the compensation due from the
infringer to the patentee.”  Packet Co. v. Sickles, 19 Wall. 
611, 617–618 (1874); see also Clews v. Jamieson, 182 U. S. 
461,  480  (1901)  (describing  an  accounting  as  involving  a
“ ‘distribution of the trust moneys among all the beneficiar-
ies who are entitled to share therein’ ” in an action against 
the governing committee of a stock exchange). 

Equity courts also generally awarded profits-based rem-
edies against individuals or partners engaged in concerted