Secondary Liability

What is Secondary Liability?

Secondary liability is the responsibility that falls on a party when the party with the primary liability can't satisfy their legal obligations.

Grasping Secondary Liability

Basically, secondary liability is where one party takes care of the actions of another party. Secondary liability happens when one party works with, materially contributes to, actuates, or is in some alternate way responsible for the encroaching acts performed by the another party. Secondary liability is regularly applied to the violation of copyrights and other intellectual property rights, including trademark and patent infringements.

There are basically two types of secondary liability: vicarious liability and contributory liability.

• Vicarious liability exists under the doctrine of agency under common law, otherwise called respondeat superior. It covers the obligations of bosses for the actions of their agents or employees, under the traditional master-servant principle. In any case, vicarious liability has been extended by the courts to incorporate the people who profit from encroaching activities, when an enterprise has both the ability and the right to prevent such infringement.

For instance, in Dreamland Ball Room v. Shapiro, Bernstein and Co., the owner of a ballroom was found to be obligated for requesting that a symphony play copyrighted works, without compensating the copyright holder, on the grounds that the ballroom owner profited from this violation. Even however the ensemble was employed as an independent contractor, vicarious liability was assigned to the employer under the respondeat superior principle.

• Contributory liability, otherwise called contributory infringement, comes from tort theory and expects the outsider to take responsibility assuming that they are aware of or upheld the primary act. On account of contributory liability, liability is assigned to parties who contributed to the infringements committed by others. Contributory liability requires both information on the infringements and material contributions to them. Parties must realize that they are materially contributing to the infringement of copyrights to be held at risk through contributory liability.

The case Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. tried the scope of contributory liability to be applied to new advances. Universal City Studios sued Sony, contending that their sale of a home VCR materially contributed to illegal copyright infringement. The Supreme Court of the United States found that, even however Sony might have intentionally and materially contributed to copyright infringement by means of the sale of its Betamax VCRs, contributory liability could not be applied in light of the fact that the technology could be "generally utilized for real, unobjectionable purposes," in particular, playing authorized copies of video tapes for home review. Thusly, contributory liability can't be applied to new advancements, as long as that technology is "fit for substantial non-encroaching purposes."

Features

• Two types of secondary liability are vicarious liability, which considers employers responsible for the actions of their employees, and contributory liability, which expects the outsider to take responsibility assuming they are aware of or upheld the primary act.
• Secondary liability is the responsibility that falls on a party when the party with the primary liability can't satisfy their legal obligations.
• Secondary liability is commonly applied to the violation of copyrights and other intellectual property rights, including trademark and patent infringements.