The Commerce Department failed to select more than one respondent in both the antidumping duty and countervailing duty investigations on solar cells from Thailand, the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee argued last week in a pair of complaints. The alliance, which served as the petitioner for both investigations, said that Commerce failed to abide by U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit precedent by not selecting more than one respondent where multiple companies are subject to the investigations (American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee v. United States, CIT #s 25-00165, -00167).
The petitioner and a pair of respondents traded briefs at the Court of International Trade regarding various elements of the Commerce Department's countervailing duty investigation on frozen warmwater shrimp from Ecuador (Industrial Pesquera Santa Priscila v. United States, CIT Consol. # 25-00025).
Importer HyAxiom prevailed in the Court of International Trade on Aug. 26 in its case regarding the classification of its PC50 supermodules. CIT Judge Timothy Stanceu held that the products are water gas generators, not electric generators or multifunctional machines.
Importer Cozy Comfort filed its opening brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Aug. 25, arguing that the Court of International Trade was wrong to find that the company's product, The Comfy, is a pullover and not a blanket (Cozy Comfort v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 25-1889).
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated between Aug. 19 and Aug. 21 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):
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.