Posts Tagged: "Judge Jimmie Reyna"

The dispute arose from a Mexican patent infringement suit between Stellar and two of Allied’s Mexican distributors. Allied manufactures the products accused of infringement in the United States, which are then sold in Mexico by Allied’s Mexican’s distributors. Allied sells the same product in the United States under a different name… For a patent dispute to be an actual controversy, the courts look at affirmative actions taken by the patentee, communication between the parties, the relevant litigation history, and the relationship between any foreign suits and the US parties and patents. Assertion of a foreign patent against foreign distributors does not per se create an actual controversy, for declaratory judgment, regarding infringement of a corresponding US patent by a US manufacturer.

After briefly parsing the statutory language of §1400(b) critical to the decision the Federal Circuit concluded that Judge Gilstrap’s four-factor test was not compliant with the statutory language. Judge Lourie simply concluded: “The district court’s four-factor test is not sufficiently tethered to this statutory language and thus it fails to inform each of the necessary requirements of the statute.”… “The fact that Cray allowed its employees to work from the Eastern District of Texas is insufficient,” wrote Judge Lourie as he shifted to the specifics of the case before the Court.

Objective indicia must be evaluated before drawing an ultimate conclusion on obviousness, but are not necessarily part of a prima facie “motivation-to-combine” analysis. To prove inequitable conduct based on failure to correct a misrepresentation, the moving party must show actual knowledge of a material misrepresentation and a deliberate failure to inform the PTO with an intent to deceive.

The standards for overturning a jury verdict and Court’s award of enhanced damages are high. The legal standard regarding lost profits is not limited to one third party sale and courts have discretion to determine if substantial evidence supports a finding of lost profits.

At the Federal Circuit, Honeywell argued that the Board erred in (1) finding a motivation to combine the references with a reasonable expectation of success, (2) rejecting Honeywell’s objective evidence of patentability, and (3) relying on a new ground of rejection (Omure), without giving Honeywell notice and opportunity to respond. The Court found that the Board improperly relied on inherency to find the claims obvious and in its analysis of motivation to combine. First, the Board’s analysis was internally inconsistent. While finding that “the claimed combination’s stability/miscibility is an inherent property of HFO-123yf and cannot confer patentability, the Board also acknowledged that inherent properties must be considered if they demonstrate unexpected and nonobvious results.

The district court made clearly erroneous factual findings that independently supported reversal. Particularly, the record supported a finding that this case was exceptional given the weakness of AdjustaCam’s litigating position. The evidence offered by AdjustaCam showed that its lawsuit was baseless. However, the district court instead found that AdjustaCam’s litigation position was not exceptional because Newegg’s ball-and-socket products were constrained in such a way that AdjustaCam could reasonably argue that it rotated on a single axis, consistent with the original district judge’s Markman order. But the Court pointed out that AdjustaCam never advanced this argument.

The Federal Circuit vacated three interference decisions, in which the Board found that Stanford’s claims were unpatentable for lack of written description, and remanded for further proceedings… The Court thus vacated the interference decisions and remanded for the Board to (1) “reconsider whether Quake’s relevant patents and applications satisfy the written description requirement” and (2) examine whether the artisan “would have known, as of the priority date, that the … specification references to Illumina products meant random MPS sequencing as recited in the claims” and whether he or she “would have understood that the … specification disclosed random MPS sequencing, as opposed to whether the specification did not preclude targeted MPS sequencing.”

The Cleveland Clinic’s diagnostic or “testing” patents at issue dealt with a process by which an enzyme was measured and correlated against known levels of the enzyme in patients who were healthy or had cardiovascular disease. The Federal Circuit applied the two step Alice analysis, affirming a finding of Section 101 ineligibility and a failure by plaintiff to state a claim of contributory or induced infringement.

Outdry appealed from a Board determination that its patent directed to waterproofing leather was invalid as obvious in an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding. Outdry challenged the Board’s claim construction and motivation to combine findings. The Federal Circuit affirmed.

MindGeek and Playboy filed an IPR petition. The Board determined that § 112 ¶ 6 did not apply because “‘wireless device means’ is not purely functional language, but rather is language that denotes structure.” In the alternative, Skky argued that the “wireless device means” term should be construed to require multiple processors or a specialized processor. The Board found Skky’s alternative argument unconvincing. The claims were held invalid in light of prior art that disclosed a “wireless device means,” specifically a cell phone. Skky appealed.

In Credit Acceptance Corp. v. Westlake Servs. the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) in a Covered Business Method (“CBM”) review proceeding, agreeing with the Board that petitioner Westlake was not estopped from maintaining a CBM review of the challenged claims and confirming that the challenged claims are unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101… Dissenting-in-part, Judge Mayer would have held that the Court does not have jurisdiction to review a decision by the Board regarding a motion to terminate a post-grant review proceeding as barred by § 325(e)(1).

The Court determined that the scope of the arbitration provision did not cover the intellectual property claims before the district court because the arbitration provision only covered the obligations established by the Agreement (the promotion of the plaintiff’s products).

The Eastern District of Texas granted a preliminary injunction against Aurobindo in favor of Mylan in the case of Mylan Institutional LLC v. Aurobindo Pharma Ltd. On appeal at the Federal Ciruit, Aurobindo challenged three district court findings: 1) it was likely that Aurobindo infringed; 2) Aurobindo failed to raise a substantial question of validity; and 3) there was irreparable harm to Mylan. The Federal Circuit found that, while the district court made some errors, it correctly analyzed one of the three Mylan patents, and the preliminary injunction was affirmed.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a non-precedential decision in Intellectual Ventures II, LLC v. Ericsson, Inc. (2016-1739, 2016-1740, 2016-1741) directed to three related IPRs, denying that the patentee was denied due process when the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (the “Board”) employed a “surprise” claim construction in its opinion that had not been explicitly argued by either side to find the claims obvious. Because the Federal Circuit decided that the patentee had both notice and an opportunity to respond, it held that no due process violation occurred.

In a rare IPR affirming patentability, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (the “Board”) found claims of US Patent No. 6,945,013 to be patentable that were directed to a “method for automatically aseptically bottling aseptically sterilized foodstuffs” in which bottles are “aseptically disinfected at a rate greater than 100 bottles per minute”. However, this unusual pro-patentee outcome was too much for the Federal Circuit. It ultimately vacated and remanded on claim construction grounds, thus highlighting the success of IPRs in achieving their goal of judicial economy.