Two 3D-printing pen kit importers moved for judgment Aug. 25 saying their products are demonstrably toys, not hand tools, based on the Carborundum factors (Quantified Operations v. United States, CIT # 22-00178).
The Court of International Trade on Aug. 26 vacated the National Marine Fisheries Service's comparability findings on New Zealand's West Coast North Island multispecies set-net and trawl fisheries, though the court declined to compel NMFS to issue an import ban on fish and fish products from these fisheries under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).
CBP issued a ruling that "effectively modified" a limited exclusion order prohibiting imports of Apple Watches containing pulse oximeters that infringe Masimo's patents, allowing Apple to bypass the ban, the U.S. medical product company told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in an Aug. 20 complaint (Masimo Corp. v. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, D.D.C. # 25-2749).
Court of International Trade Judge M. Miller Baker remanded Aug. 22 the Commerce Department’s decision to combine Belgian citric acid review respondent Citribel’s quarterly raw material costs with its annualized conversion costs.
The Court of International Trade sustained Aug. 22 the Commerce Department’s finding that a Vietnamese currency undervaluation program was specific to the traded goods sector, and thus countervailable in a countervailing duty investigation on passenger vehicle and light truck tires. The court said Commerce’s analysis was properly based on predominant use, distinguishing it from a disproportionality analysis.
In remand results released Aug. 15, the Commerce Department maintained its application of adverse facts available to Vietnamese exporters investigated in a solar cells circumvention inquiry (Trina Solar (Vietnam) Science & Technology Co. v. United States, CIT # 23-00228).
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated on Aug. 14-15 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
Chinese exporters of steel racks submitted a complaint Aug. 19 to the Court of International Trade objecting to the Commerce Department's use of Cohen's d test in its affirmative dumping finding (Jiangsu Nova Intelligent Logistics Equipment Co. v. U.S., CIT # 25-00175).
Court of International Trade Judge Timothy Reif ruled Aug. 21 that Canadian lumber exporter J.D. Irving’s 2022 case challenging the cash deposit rate assigned to certain entries should have been brought to a binational panel under 1581(c), not to the trade court under 1581(i). He said that the “true nature” of the exporter’s case was a challenge to a 2019 antidumping duty review’s results. His analysis, he said, was identical to the analysis offered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit when it upheld Reif’s dismissal of the exporter’s prior case (J.D. Irving v. United States, CIT # 22-00256).
Court of International Trade Judge Claire Kelly again remanded the Commerce Department’s de facto specificity finding regarding South Korea’s below-cost provision of off-peak electricity in a countervailing duty administrative review, saying the department still hasn’t rationally explained why it grouped three unrelated industries and found that they, together, disproportionately received the subsidy.