Posts Tagged: "litigation"

One aspect of the recent Lex Machina report that should jump out to anyone who has closely followed the patent litigation sector over the past few years is that the high percentage of all patent cases filed at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (E.D. Tex.) has dropped significantly. During 2015, E.D. Tex. received 43 percent of all patent infringement cases filed in American district courts. This dropped off steeply to 30 percent, or 291 cases filed, during 2016’s first quarter.

Source Code Review is the most powerful tool in a litigator’s war chest in patent and trade secrets cases. An important consequence of the judicial climate shifting farther away from business methods and closer to technically complex IP is that receiving parties now face a higher burden of proof and subsequently higher legal costs. Not only are receiving parties now required to be more diligent prior to a case filing but they also end up spending extra thousands of dollars reviewing millions of lines of code to successfully formulating their infringement arguments. A significant cost and exposure risk can be avoided simply by a diligent assessment on both sides as to what source code needs to be produced to the receiving party.

The volume of electronic data and the costs involved in collecting, culling and reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) are critical considerations in any litigation, large or small. Parties to a lawsuit are inevitably faced with significant litigation costs, due in large part to the burden of responding to overly broad discovery requests relating to ESI. To maximize the value of the e-discovery process, corporate counsel should ask how outside counsel plans to efficiently analyze ESI and reduce the expenses associated with e-discovery. Here are some specific questions to consider.

The Court held that printed matter must be claimed for what it communicates, and it is only afforded patentable weight if the claimed informational content has a functional or structural relation to the substrate. In this case, the Court held that the Board erred in finding that the origins of the web assets made them printed subject matter, because nothing in the claim called for the origin to be part of the web asset.

On November 2, 2015, San Francisco-based Fitbit Inc. filed a Section 337 complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) against AliphCom (d/b/a Jawbone) and BodyMedia, Inc. (Investigation No. ITC-337-3096). In a parallel proceeding in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, Case No. 1:15-CV-00990, Fitbit alleged infringement of three patents assigned to Fitbit—namely, U.S. Patent Nos. 8,920,332 (titled Wearable Heart Rate Monitor); 8,868,377 (titled Portable Monitoring Devices and Methods of Operating Same); and 9,089,760 (titled System and Method for Activating a Device Based on a Record of Physical Activity). According to the district court complaint, Jawbone’s products associated with components of its UP series of trackers indirectly infringe the patents-at-issue. Fitbit hopes that it will be successful in preventing the import and sale in America of wearable activity tracking devices sold by Jawbone by requesting the ITC to issue a limited exclusion order and a cease and desist order.

Two of the biggest post-production/3D-conversion companies are preparing for battle in a patent infringement suit that is sure to create enemies and allies in the world of film post-production. Prime Focus Creative Services Canada filed a patent infringement suit against Legend3D in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. In the March 30, 2015 complaint, Prime Focus World requested a jury trial, an injunction banning Legend3D from performing the patented process, a finding of willful infringement and unspecified monetary damages. Each company has some of the biggest blockbusters in recent memory.

The court ruled that the relevance of her photographs greatly outweighed Nucci’s minimal privacy interest. Nucci argued that she had a legitimate expectation of privacy in her photographs since her Facebook profile was set to “private.” However, the court was not convinced and explained that photographs posted on a social media site are neither privileged nor protected by any right of privacy, regardless of the privacy settings established by the user. After all, the court pointed out that the very nature of these social media sites is to share photographs with others, so a user cannot later claim a legitimate expectation of privacy.

Time and time again throughout the legislative history post grant proceedings were explained as being a faster, low-cost alternative to litigating validity disputes in Federal District Court. That being the case, it would seem extremely odd that any petitioner could bring a post grant challenge to a patent when that petitioner would not have standing to sue to invalidate the patent in Federal District Court. However, the statute does say that a person other than the patent owner can file a petition to institute an inter partes review.

Our first move was to understand who was being identified as “Trolls” by the authorities who have been writing articles so long on the topic. We were surprised to find upon extensive searching on the Internet that we could not find a single research paper which provided any exhaustive list of the huge numbers of “Trolls” which were said to be stalking corporate America. Instead we found many papers making their analyses based upon proprietary databases that were not available to the public, and thus the veracity of the designation “Troll” was not subject to any validation. We decided to do some investigative reporting, contacting a number of the authors of the so-called troll stories. We were surprised over and over again to be given the same explanation – the lists of trolls they were referencing in the articles were considered “trade secrets”.