The determination of damages for trademark infringement or unfair competition is not as uniform as in patent cases or copyright cases because the enforcement of trademarks can be governed by federal substantive law, state law or both.

Part 2 covers infringer's profits and statutory damages.

The determination of copyright damages is uniform more throughout the United States than the determination of trade-secret damages because substantive copyright law is federal law exclusively.

This is a continuation of part 3, which can be found here.

This is a continuation of part 2, which can be found here.

Unjust enrichment can be determined through at least two different methods: the defendant’s profits or the defendant’s cost reduction.

The next set of blog posts will discuss trade-secret damages. Trade-secret law, unlike patent law, is governed by both state and federal law in the U.S. As a result, the law is not necessarily uniform throughout the U.S. Nevertheless, trade-secret damages, generally, can take one of three forms: actual loss caused by misappropriation, unjust enrichment and reasonable royalties.

My last “damages” blog post presented the 16 Georgia Pacific factors that can be considered by a jury in determining a reasonable royalty award in a patent infringement case. The Georgia Pacific factors may not be the only issues that arise in determining a reasonable royalty.

I want to take a break from my series on intellectual-property (IP) decisions to review the first Supreme Court IP decision in 2019. The decision for the case titled “Helsinn Healthcare S.A. v. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc.” was issued on Jan. 22, 2019.

Reasonable royalties represent the lower estimate of damages in patent infringement cases. The determination of a reasonable royalty can be a very complicated calculation that can be based on as many as 16, which include...