Posts in District Courts

In 2017, screenwriters Lee Alfred and Ezequiel Martinez Jr. embarked on what would be a five-year journey for their copyright infringement claim against Walt Disney Pictures over the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Now, one year after it resolved, their legacy lives on through a new era of copyright litigation in Hollywood. Courts continue to rely on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the Pirates case to allow screenwriters and other artists to proceed past the pleading stage. With that pendulum swing, litigants in copyright cases over Hollywood films will face a range of undeveloped issues. This article provides a brief recap of the impact from the Pirates case and identifies several open issues that litigants are likely to address in future cases as a result.

On November 13, global investment banking firm BTIG filed a lawsuit  in California state court against rival company StoneX Group, alleging trade secret and breach of contract claims related to a StoneX’s recruitment of several key BTIG employees in order to gain access to valuable proprietary software code developed at BTIG. BTIG’s suit seeks disgorged profits of $200 million as well as remuneration for StoneX’s unjust enrichment, which BTIG estimates could reach over $1 billion.

Just a few weeks after Google waived its right to respond, the Supreme Court denied a petition challenging a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision that held a Texas district court erred in ruling against the search engine and tech behemoth. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found the inventors of a method for protecting computers from malware—Alfonso Cioffi and Allen Rozman (the patent is now assigned to Melanie, Megan and Morgan Rozman)—had proven that Google’s Chrome web browser infringed their reissue patents RE43,500, RE43,528, and RE43,529 and that the claims were not invalid. After a first time at the Federal Circuit in which the case was remanded to the district court, a jury awarded Cioffi, et. al. $20 million in past damages and the district court in post-trial review rejected Google’s “original patent defense.”

On November 8, a Central California jury entered a verdict awarding $3.9 million in punitive damages against Internet financial platform ConsumerDirect. The verdict comes weeks after U.S. District Judge James Selna granted a motion for sanctions  after finding that ConsumerDirect fraudulently represented its ownership of unregistered trademarks while obtaining a preliminary injunction in U.S. district court against Array.

On October 16, a jury verdict  entered in the District of Delaware awarded $9 million to 3G Licensing, a subsidiary of European patent pool operator Sisvel, after finding that Taiwanese consumer electronics company HTC Corp. willfully infringed upon a pair of cellular telecommunications patents. The verdict follows summary judgment rulings in the case against HTC and other defendants, who argued that the asserted patents were encumbered by fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing obligations without establishing the patents’ essentiality to any standard.

It was another slow week for patent filings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and a typical week in district courts, with 52 district court complaints filed and 22 new PTAB petitions. There was a new discretionary denial, a bunch of litigation-provoked high-profile PTAB challenges, and some notable new litigations. There was another Fintiv discretionary denial this week: here, a Chinese patent owner, Ningde Amperex Technology Ltd., benefited from the Board’s discretionary denial rules in a petition brought by another Chinese battery company. The case, IPR2023-00585, leaves unaddressed the questions raised about the validity of U.S. Patent 11329352.

An interesting tale of intrigue and woe is being written in the decade-long relationship between Google and Sonos. The most recent chapter ended with the district court finding the Sonos patents at issue in their patent litigation against Google were unenforceable due to laches because Sonos had the audacity to file a continuation and seek claims supported by—and actually incorporated from—an earlier filing. According to the district court, because Sonos could have filed those claims in the continuation earlier, that created a laches defense for Google.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today issued a precedential decision holding that a Delaware district court erred in its claim construction of a term with respect to Malvern Panalytical, Inc.’s patents. Specifically, the CAFC said the district court erred by relying heavily on the patent prosecution history statements for a related patent that had been cited in the information disclosure statement (IDS) during supplemental examination of one of the patents-in-suit to inform its construction of the term in question.

Late yesterday evening, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA)—the firm representing U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) Judge Pauline Newman in her district court case against CAFC Chief Judge Moore and other members of the panel of the Judicial Council who are accusing Newman of being unfit to serve on the court—filed a brief asking the D.C. district court to deny the Council’s September Motion to Dismiss and to halt her recent suspension from duties. The brief calls the Council’s actions thus far “ultra vires and inconsistent both with constitutional strictures and the [Judicial Conduct and Disability] Act [of 1980] itself.”

Music publishing companies Universal Music, ABKCO and Concord filed suit on Wednesday, October 18, in a Tennessee district court against generative artificial intelligence (AI) company, Anthropic, alleging “widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.” Anthropic’s core product is the AI ChatBot, Claude, which can be used to generate song lyrics to popular songs owned by the publishers or to generate “original” song lyrics in response to “requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter,” for example, according to the complaint. These outputs also copy the publishers’ lyrics because Claude is trained on the infringing works and does not license the copyrights to those works, like other music lyric aggregators, said the publishers.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision on Friday vacating-in-part a district court decision that granted SonicWall, Inc. summary judgment of invalidity based on a collateral estoppel decision that the CAFC had since vacated. Judge Bryson concurred in part and dissented in part, disagreeing with the majority’s analysis affirming the district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement as to the claims of certain patents.

A trademark lawsuit filed by popular grocery store chain, Trader Joe’s, against a cryptocurrency platform called “Trader Joe”—which the complaint alleges is a deliberate reference to the supermarket—has come to light this week. Trader Joe’s claims that the crypto firm buried its origin story in order to win international litigation over the domain name, traderjoexyz.com. Trader Joe’s has offered grocery services under the mark TRADER JOE’S for more than 50 years. According to the lawsuit, a co-founder of the crypto company Trader Joe, going by the handle “cryptofish,” admitted in a Substack publication that the company’s name originally derived from the name of the Trader Joe’s supermarket chain.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday, October 10, affirmed a district court’s dismissal at the pleading stage of a patent infringement, unjust enrichment and antitrust case against Qualcomm, Inc. Larry Golden sued Qualcomm in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging infringement of his patents on a system for locking, unlocking or disabling locks on vehicles upon detection of chemical or biological hazards, as well as antitrust and unjust enrichment claims.

On September 6, OpenAI faced its second invasion of privacy lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California, for allegedly stealing private information from millions of internet users. While the Plaintiffs acknowledge in their complaint that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to create life-saving technologies and herald discoveries that could improve our daily lives, they claim OpenAI crossed the line of using altruistic means of reaching its objective when it abruptly restructured itself into a for-profit business. Following this restructuring, the Plaintiffs allege OpenAI scraped private information from millions of users to train their Large Language Models. Here are five key allegations from the privacy suit against OpenAI.

Following Elon Musk’s bold rebrand of social media platform Twitter, the many lawsuits that have been expected have begun to roll in. In what is said to be the first, X Social Media, LLC has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, charging Musk’s X Corp. with willful trademark infringement, as well as common law violations under Florida competition, trademark and service mark laws and violations of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.