Opinion ID: 4076467
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt”

Text: Letters Beyond the general infection of the jury’s consideration of the reasonableness of Avaya’s actions, the District Court’s grant of judgment as a matter of law also undercut a specific portion of Avaya’s antitrust defense. Among the evidence put forward by TLI to prove predatory conduct were the FUD letters. Those letters told customers that MSPs “are not available to customers of Unauthorized Service Providers,” that “Unauthorized Maintenance Service Providers do not have rights to receive [MSP] benefits, nor do they have rights to use Avaya logins,” and that “[u]se of MSPs, or any Avaya Login ... without a license from Avaya, is an infringement of Avaya’s intellectual property rights.” (J.A. 7303-04.) Whether those letters could constitute monopolistic conduct turned on whether they were true. As the District Court instructed the jury, “the law does not allow [TLI’s] injury to be based on ... Avaya’s dissemination of truthful statements.” (J.A. 621.) The jury’s assessment of the letters’ truthfulness was surely influenced by the District Court’s instruction that TLI’s “use of and access to such maintenance software may not be considered by you as unlawful” and that “[t]o the extent Avaya has alleged that TLI[] engaged in illegal or unlawful conduct, in connection with its business operations, such allegations should be disregarded.” (J.A. 615.) That instruction all but told the jury that the letters were false in their allegation that TLI’s access was unlawful. 74 TLI’s trial counsel then connected those closely adjacent dots when he took advantage of the instruction to argue to the jury that Avaya’s FUD letters were untruthful and therefore monopolistic: Even though it acknowledged that it had no legal basis to do so,[39] Avaya sent FUD letters to TLI’s customers ... . As the Court will instruct you tomorrow, you are not to consider ... TLI’s access to the maintenance commands or the maintenance software as unlawful, but Avaya’s FUD campaign simply did not convey truthful information. (J.A. 4736.)40 39 We have been shown nothing in the record suggesting that Avaya acknowledged that it had “no legal basis” to send the so-called FUD letters. To the contrary, Avaya’s entire affirmative case relied in large part on a belief that TLI’s unauthorized provision of maintenance services did lead customers to breach their contracts with Avaya. On appeal, Avaya continues to argue that the FUD letters were truthful. 40 The Dissent contends that “[e]ven if the jury had not been instructed that unauthorized access to Avaya software was not illegal, it is unlikely that it would have reached a different verdict.” (Dissenting Op. at 13.) The Dissent says that Avaya seemed to concede that the FUD letters included some “over-the-top” prose (id.), but be that as it may, the 75