Court Opinion

ID: 9471014
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:23:23.029293+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:14.192325
License: Public Domain

*1126NICHOLS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join in Judge Friedman’s clear and able opinion, but I would go further.
The record here reflects little short of total breakdown of the laws respecting unfair practices in import trade, e.g., 19 U.S.C. § 1337, at least as applied to video games. Counsel in oral argument also characterized 19 U.S.C. § 1526 as ineffective so far as they were concerned.
It is evident that a breakdown of law enforcement inflicts injury far beyond the immediate victim. If persons are lawlessly gunned down on the public streets, and the state makes no effective response, those far removed from the scene acquire hand guns for personal protection, with all the dangers incident. They stay off all streets at night, and some at any time, to the point they are virtually prisoners in their own homes. The prosperity of legitimate business is destroyed, real estate values tumble, and jobs vanish from the employment market, except perhaps jobs as private guards, which proliferate. Eventually, if things go far enough, all will adhere to some mafia, or other extra-legal government, hoping it will avenge their death, and being, unlike the state, perfectly willing to do so, may even deter that event from happening. These are the reasons why murder is not, as it once was, a merely private wrong, to be avenged by the family of the victim only.
Something parallel, if less dramatic, occurs if the state creates patent and trademark rights and fails to enforce them, though they are important to the state and not to the patent and trademark holder only. If, however, the original producing infringer is outside the United States, the burden of enforcement falls on different shoulders. By § 1337, the ITC is here the chief of police, and the officers of the customs are the patrolmen on the beat, doing what they are told.
The treatment of “injury” to a domestic industry as abated if the domestic industry dies during the course of the ITC proceeding, impresses me as one of the evasions law enforcement officers are prone to when the task appears too formidable. I heartily join in the court’s condemnation of it. But, to me, the weird definition of “domestic industry” is likewise an evasion. To me it is obvious there is one industry: all the law-abiding domestic producers of video games. Is there a new industry every time an Italian designer comes out with a new design of women’s shoes, or is there a shoe industry? A public and obvious demonstration that the protective laws are ineffectual induces capital to be withdrawn from the industry to some safer use, and prevents new video games from being conceived, manufactured, and marketed in a lawful way. Is this not the injury the Congress enacted § 1337 to prevent? If not, what was it?
It is not, however, my intent to pronounce dicta on the infinite variety of future eases that may come before the court. The congressional purpose is best served by flexibility. It may make a difference in what context “injury” is used which may include dumping and countervailing duty cases. “Injury” may at times be narrowly focused and it would frustrate Congress to look at a broad industry that may remain healthy. In the Von Clemm case, cited by the panel, it is made clear the statute therefore does not require the “industry” be of any particular size nor does it specify whether the “industry” is one company or several. Here we have not just one company, but one product of one company singled out as the whole “industry.” Obviously the language that defines “injury” as including “or to prevent the establishment of such an industry” is deprived of all meaning if limited to preventing establishment of another “industry” to produce the Rally-X game. We might be safe in assuming that the suppositious founder of a new “industry” always would seek to differentiate his product in some fashion and it seems to me going too far to suppose that by effectuating such a policy he would take himself outside the statute. Such an interpretation makes the statute a disincentive to resourcefulness.