Latham Trial Team Defeats US$660 Million Copyright Damages Claim in Florida Federal Court for Sandals Resorts
In a win for Latham’s IP and Complex Commercial litigators, on July 21, 2025, Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga of the Southern District of Florida rejected the damages claim of plaintiff HH Advertising, Inc. (HH) in a hard-fought copyright dispute with the threat of US$660 million in potential damages against our clients Sandals Resorts International 2000 Inc. (SRI 2000) and Sandals Resorts International Limited (SRI Limited) (together Sandals) and co-parties, Unique Travel Corp. (UTC) and Unique Vacations, Inc. (UVI) (together Unique). In the judge’s findings of fact and conclusions of law entered following a multi-week bench trial, she rejected the plaintiff’s disgorgement request for hundreds of millions of dollars and awarded just US$49,500 in statutory damages, adopting with a slight modification Sandals’ proposed damages measurement.
SRI 2000 is the upstream parent company of SRI Limited and the parent company of several entities that own and manage the Sandals and Beaches Resorts in the Caribbean. SRI Limited is a hotel management company for the resorts.
Since the 1990s, HH had enjoyed a long and prosperous relationship with SRI 2000 and various Unique entities. However, in October 2023, HH filed a federal complaint against SRI Limited and Unique, seeking a declaration that it is the copyright owner of the advertising works that it created during the parties’ relationship. Following jurisdictional discovery relating to SRI Limited, HH upped the ante, filing an amended complaint adding SRI 2000 as a defendant and asserting a claim against all defendants for copyright infringement.
On the eve of trial, HH waived its jury trial demand and elected to proceed in a bench trial, which took place over three weeks this spring.
As the evidence showed at trial, HH entered into a verbal agreement with SRI 2000 and certain Unique entities in the early 1990s to provide advertising services for the benefit of the Sandals and Beaches Resorts. Over this 30-year relationship, HH was paid to produce advertising content for the defendants, including photographs for use on the sandals.com and beaches.com websites. However, in summer 2023, HH demanded for the first time that the defendants pay for the right to use the works going forward notwithstanding those prior payments. HH then sent a cease-and-desist letter to the defendants demanding that they stop using the works at issue.
Although initially claiming infringement for more than 2,200 works produced, HH ultimately abandoned 1,560 of those works by the conclusion of trial and solely proffered evidence with respect to 645 photographs and videos used on the Sandals.com website. HH sought US$660 million in disgorgement and statutory damages based on the defendants’ use of those works for approximately one year while Sandals transitioned to new advertising works.
On July 21, 2025, Chief Judge Altonaga entered her decision, rejecting HH’s disgorgement claim and finding that HH had failed to show that the defendants had obtained any specific amount of revenues from the use of the allegedly infringing works. She also rejected HH’s statutory damages claim, finding that it had only registered 33 works before HH sent the cease-and-desist letter and, as a result, only 33 works qualified for statutory damages. The judge also declined to adopt the amount of statutory damages per work requested by HH, awarding only US$1,500 per work (instead of the US$150,000 per work HH had demanded). The judge based the award in part on her finding that the defendants had a good faith belief that they had an implied license to continue to use the works given their past payments for the works.
For this achievement, Latham earned American Lawyer Litigators of the Week recognition.
The victorious Sandals trial team was led by partner Matthew Walch with associates Jessica Saba, Sara Castiglia, Jonas Hallstein, and Corey Stewart.