Posts Tagged: "patent infringement"

Federal Trade Commission Urges SCOTUS to Deny AbbVie Petition

On Wednesday, May 19, the response brief of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in AbbVie v. FTC. The petition for writ of certiorari filed by AbbVie asks the nation’s highest court to decide whether lower courts erred in finding that AbbVie’s Hatch-Waxman district court litigation involving patents covering its AndroGel testosterone treatment met the sham litigation exception to Noerr-Pennington doctrine. The FTC’s brief urged the Supreme Court to deny AbbVie’s petition for writ, a decision that arguably could cast into doubt pharmaceutical firms’ ability to enforce their patent rights under decades-old legislation meant to balance the economic interests of innovative drug developers with the public interests served by generic drug makers.

Patent Filings Roundup: New NPE Solid-State Drive Suit Against Micron, Western Digital; Redfin Indemnitee Files IPR on Virtual Reality Tour Patents

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) had the usual 30 or so petitions this week (32, to be exact), with a fair number of procedural denials of concurrently filed petitions (i.e., the one-petition rule from the July 2019 updated Trial Practice Guide). District court patent filings sat at 71, with a significant number of Leigh Rothschild suits adding new defendants

A Licensor’s FRAND Commitments Do Not Limit A Licensee’s Rights

Part one of this two-part series responding to a series of articles on FRAND statements addressed the appropriate royalty base for cellular standard-essential patents (SEPs). This article now addresses the fourth and fifth articles in that series, where the authors describe the “FRAND process.” The authors start from a mistaken premise that holders of SEPs subject to FRAND commitments enjoy more rights than all other patent holders traditionally possess, and that SEP holders’ FRAND commitments impose obligations on potential licensees rather than on the SEP holders themselves. For example, the authors appear to recoil at the idea that “SEP owners should prove to prospective licensees that licenses are needed.” As the authors apparently conceive of the FRAND process, potential licensees have no right to challenge the claims of SEP holders as to the necessity of a license. The only relevant question to them appears to be how large a royalty payment should be, without regard to the patent merits.

Unpacking 5G SEPs and Standards Contribution Data

With multiple reports published by many different entities on 5G leadership, it is hard to know who to believe, as there is little transparency about where the data comes from and what types of analysis were applied to retrieve the results, let alone how to try to reproduce any such analysis yourself. Most of the time, understanding standard essential patents (SEPs), standards and patents requires access to multiple databases, the valuable time of your subject matter experts, as well as both in-house and outside counsel. In the end, it can appear that you are spending far more resources on gathering the data than on gaining actionable knowledge from it to understand what it means to your business, your portfolio and your strategy.

CAFC Reverses District Court, Finds California Jurisdiction Proper in Declaratory Judgment Action

On May 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) reversed and remanded the dismissal of a declaratory judgment action in an appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint was brought by Trimble, Inc. (Trimble) and Innovative Software Engineering, LLC (ISE) against PerDiemCo, seeking a declaratory judgment that neither Trimble nor ISE infringed any of the 11 patents that PerDiemCo asserted against it.