Posts in District Courts

Judge Alan Albright’s Western District of Texas courtroom in Waco, Texas is the preferred venue for patent cases and the new patent rocket docket. Prior to Judge Albright taking the bench, patent cases filed in Waco were scarce, but since Albright taking the bench, patent cases have exploded. Through November 23, 2020, 3,863  patent cases have been filed nationwide. Of that number, nearly 791  have been filed in Judge Albright’s court.

Thanksgiving week was another light week at the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB), with 19 petitions filed (all IPRs).

On November 19, the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Vectura Limited v. GlaxoSmithKline LLC in which the court affirmed a judgment entered against GSK finding that Ellipta-brand inhalers infringed patent claims asserted by Vectura. On appeal, GSK had argued that it was entitled to new trials on infringement and damages, but the Federal Circuit disagreed.

On November 20, the Federal Circuit issued a modified opinion following a petition for panel rehearing filed by Network-1. The petition came after the CAFC affirmed-in-part and reversed-in-part a district court’s claim construction and remanded the case to the district court on September 24, 2020, in Network-1 Technologies, Inc. v. Hewlett-Packard Company. In the revised opinion, the CAFC said that it would not consider Network-1’s alternative grounds for granting a judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) on validity nor its new trial motion in the first instance.

The Federal Circuit reversed a district court finding that an inventor of water park surfing attractions breached his employment agreement and that his co-inventor was improperly listed as an inventor. The CAFC based the decision on its best prediction of how the California Supreme Court would interpret state law as applied to the case, applying the “employment contracts in a manner highly protective of former employees”.

It was a light week for Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings, with just 18 new petitions, while the district courts remained busy with 71 new complaints. Some patent filings were new additions to existing assertion campaigns like Virtual Immersion [Equitable], Cedar Lane Technologies Inc., or Browse3D; at least six new filings by Viking Technologies, LLC seem to spring from a supplier relationship with smartphone repair services, detailed below.

Recent news reports about choreographer JaQuel Knight’s efforts to copyright some of his iconic dance routines, such as Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” are a reminder that such works face steep hurdles when it comes to qualifying for protection. From ballet to breakdance and Swan Lake to Saturday Night Fever, dance is part of every culture—and a surprisingly frequent source of intellectual property conflict. While works of dance clearly are eligible for copyright protection under Section 102(a)(4) of the Copyright Act, determining which dances meet the standard—and which have two left feet—has been tricky and has resulted in a number of high-profile disputes in recent years. However, a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in an unrelated copyright dispute may provide important guidance in subsequent dance-related copyright litigation.

On November 16, the U.S. Supreme Court denied petitions for certiorari in two cases from the Federal Circuit: IYM Technologies LLC v. RPX Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. and WhitServe LLC v. Donuts Inc. IYM asked the Supreme Court to grant review “to determine whether the Arthrex decision applies to all appeals that were pending when [the Arthrex decision] issued.” In the WhitServe petition, WhitServe asserted that a determination of patent ineligibility “necessitates impermissible fact-weighing at the pleading stage and eviscerates the statutory presumption of validity.”

On November 10, the Federal Circuit reversed-in-part and vacated-in-part a decision of the District of Delaware in C R Bard Inc. v. Angiodynamics, Inc. In particular, the CAFC held that there was substantial evidence in the record to support a jury finding of infringement and willfulness and that the asserted claims were not directed solely to printed matter and were patent eligible under 35 U.S.C. 101.

On November 9, the Federal Circuit granted Apple’s petition for a writ of mandamus directing the Western District of Texas to transfer Uniloc’s patent infringement suit against Apple to the Northern District of California. Judge Moore dissented, asserting that the majority applied an incorrect standard of review.

District court activity dropped to 38 new complaints this week, with 28 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) petitions – one post grant review (PGR) and 27 inter partes reviews (IPRs) – filed. It was a subdued week for WSOU and the usual big filers, with the IPRs propped up by a big funded semiconductor fight with an International Trade Commission (ITC) component.  Dominion Harbor’s Vista Peak Ventures filed against a number of overseas companies, and frequent filer Blue Spike came back with a vengeance, but on the whole, a quieter post-election week all around.

On November 6, the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, granted a motion to dismiss an infringement suit on the grounds that the patents in suit were directed to ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. 101 in Karamelion LLC v. Intermatic, Inc. The court explained that although Karamelion’s solution may be a novel application of network communication to a particular problem, “no matter how novel or groundbreaking the advance, the abstract idea cannot supply the inventive concept.”

On November 2, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, in Google LLC v. Sonos, Inc., issued an order granting Sonos’s motion to dismiss a cause of action for infringement of Google’s U.S. Patent No. 8,583,489 (the ‘489 patent). The court found that the ‘489 patent was patent ineligible as being directed to an abstract idea. Google filed a patent infringement suit against Sonos alleging that Sonos infringed five of Google’s patents, including the ‘489 patent, which is directed to systems and methods for bookmarking media content for future availability. Sonos moved to dismiss the cause of action with respect to the ‘489 patent on the ground that it was directed to ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 as an abstract idea. The ‘489 patent relates to a method of “determining if media content is available from different content sources” and “notifying a user when the availability of the media content changes.”

On November 3, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued an order in In re: Ivantis, Inc. denying a petition for a writ of mandamus filed by Ivantis. The petition asked the CAFC to vacate an order of United States District Court for the Central District of California “granting an adverse-inference instruction and to bar the district court from issuing any adverse-inference instruction or alternatively to require the district court to defer consideration of any adverse-inference instruction until the end of trial.”

On October 28, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) granted a petition for a writ of mandamus directing the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas in In re: Nitro Fluids, L.L.C. In particular, Nitro Fluids petitioned the CAFC for a writ of mandamus directing the district court to dismiss an action or transfer it to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, where an overlapping case was pending. The CAFC granted the petition to the extent that it vacated the district court’s order and directed the district court to conduct further proceedings consistent with the CAFC’s order.