Westinghouse Electric Corp. v. General Circuit Breaker & Electric Supply Inc.

I. OVERVIEW

This appeal arises from a suit brought by Westinghouse Electric Corporation (‘Westinghouse”) against several electronics vendors (“defendants”) for reselling used Westinghouse circuit breakers after reconditioning them and attaching labels bearing the Westinghouse trademark. 1 After a jury trial, the district court entered judgment in favor of the defendants on all of Westinghouse’s claims. In reaching this judgment, the district court upset one jury verdict in favor of Westinghouse on its trademark infringement claim. The district court concluded that this verdict had resulted from an erroneous jury instruction regarding the elements necessary to prove the defendants’ affirmative defenses of estoppel, acquiescence, and laches. That instruction had required the defendants to show that Westinghouse knew the defendants were copying the Westinghouse trademark—rather than merely using an original trademark without permission—in .order to establish their affirmative defenses. To correct the instructional error, the district court examined the pattern of jury verdicts, determined the facts necessarily found by the jury in reaching those verdicts, and applied the correct law…