Opinion of the Court
The Second Circuit’s contrary view, on top of having no textual support, is essentially self-defeating. With one hand, that court recognizes a discovery rule, thus enabling some copyright owners to sue for infringing acts occurring more than three years earlier. And with the other hand, the court takes away the value in what it has conferred, by preventing the recovery of damages for those older infringements. As the court below noted, the three-year damages bar thus “gut[s]” or “silently eliminate[s]” the discovery rule. 60 F. 4th, at 1333–1334; see supra, at 4. Or said another way, the damages bar makes the discovery rule functionally equivalent to its opposite number—an accrual rule based on the timing of an infringement.[1] As noted above, we do not resolve today which of those two rules should govern a copyright claim’s timeliness. See supra, at 4. But we reject applying a judicially invented damages limit to convert one of them into the other.
And we have never before proposed that course. The Second Circuit thought otherwise, relying on language in our Petrella decision to support a three-year damages cap. Sohm, 959 F. 3d, at 51–52. There we noted, as the Second Circuit emphasized, that the Copyright Act’s statute of limitations allows plaintiffs “to gain retrospective relief running only three years back from” the filing of a suit. 572 U. S., at 672; see id., at 677. Taken out of context, that line might seem to address the issue here. But in making that statement, we merely described how the limitations provision works when a plaintiff has no timely claims for infringing acts more than three years old. That was the situation in Petrella. Because the plaintiff had long known of the defendant’s infringing conduct, she could not avail herself of
- ↑ Scholars have speculated about “exceptional case[s]” in which a copyright plaintiff could get some benefit out of a discovery rule even when combined with a three-year damages bar. 3 M. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Copyright §12.05[B][2][c][ii] (2023). Suffice to say that assuming those cases exist at all, they are as rare as hen’s teeth.
