North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc.
United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
522 F.3d 1211 (2008)
Axiom (defendant), a competing medical-device maker, embedded North American Medical's (plaintiff's) trademarked terms in its website metatags so its site would appear in searches for North American's trademarks, prompting a trademark-infringement and false-advertising suit. The district court granted a preliminary injunction after finding a likelihood of success on the merits and applying the traditional presumption that irreparable harm follows automatically from that showing; Axiom appealed, arguing that presumption was undermined by the Supreme Court's intervening patent-law decision in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange.
Whether courts must grant injunctive relief in intellectual-property cases, including trademark cases, only in accordance with traditional principles of equity, rather than through an automatic presumption of irreparable harm.