Following Jury Verdict in Post University v. Learneo, Inc., Both Parties Have Filed Additional Motions
We have reported before in May 2024 and October 2021 on this long-running case involving Post University (“Post”), a for-profit university located in Waterbury, Connecticut, and Course Hero (“Course Hero”), a crowd-sourced educational resource platform owned by Learneo, Inc. The dispute involves claims by Post that Course Hero has (1) hosted unauthorized copies of user-uploaded educational materials owned by Post; (2) violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) by removing or altering copyright management information (“CMI”) on the materials and including false or misleading CMI with those materials; and (3) failed to act adequately in removing offending content.
After years of the parties trading filings, the case went to trial, and a jury found in favor of Post on February 27, 2026. In accordance with the Jury Verdict, the court’s Judgment awarded Post “$25,000 for each of 1,458 violations for a total of $36,450,000 as to all DMCA § 1202(a) violations and $25,000 for each of 1,557 violations for a total of $38,925,000 for all DMCA § 1202(b) violations and $114.85 for the plaintiff’s copyright infringement claim” (1). The Judgment was not the end of this case, however. Both parties have filed post-Judgment motions with accompanying memoranda.
Post has made a Motion for Pre- and Post-Judgment Interest, requesting that the Court send a message to Learneo and similar companies by, first, increasing the award amount to account for the long time between Post’s original communications to Course Hero and the judgment of the court and, second, adding interest measured from the date the court’s judgment was entered until the date when the award is satisfied. In its Motion, Post characterized its overall argument in this case as a stand against “piracy-based business,” stating that “there is something wrong with a business model premised upon taking other people’s work; putting it behind a paywall; and manipulating copyright management information… to facilitate the sale of the work as if it is your own—and then, for good measure, requiring rightsholders to waive their legal rights and remedies simply in exchange for gaining access to the website to police their rights” (4).
On the other hand, Course Hero filed a Motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law or a New Trial, arguing that, notwithstanding the jury verdict, the evidence in the case was insufficient to demonstrate that Course Hero had the proper scienter, intent, or knowledge to violate the DMCA and that the CMI it included on its website and with the Post materials was not false or misleading. Course Hero emphasized that it has made good-faith efforts to comply with the DMCA while providing a valuable service based on user-generated content. Course Hero also filed a Motion for Remittitur or a New Trial, requesting that the damages award assessed against it by the court be reduced significantly and arguing that the amount is grossly disproportionate to the actual damages or value of the supposedly violated copyrighted works.
It seems likely that this case could lead to an appeal, depending on how these motions are received by the court. We will provide updates going forward.