Posts Tagged: "Patent Litigation"

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit today issued a precedential opinion that said claim preclusion does not apply to allegations of induced infringement based on an earlier finding of direct infringement. The case involves U.S. Patent No. 8,206,987, owned by Inguran, LLC and directed to “a method for sorting bull sperm cells according to a specific DNA characteristic in order to preselect the gender of a domestic animal’s offspring,” according to the opinion. Inguran does business as STGenetics (ST). ST has been involved in litigation with “bull stud” company, ABS Global, Inc., since 2014.

A UK judge in May determined in a non-public judgment that has been widely reported on that Apple should pay Optis a total of $56.43 million plus interest for a worldwide FRAND license to Optis’s portfolio of 4G standard essential patents (SEPs). In the most recent development in the overall case, Apple yesterday reportedly lost its appeal in one of the four technical trials pending between the parties, meaning it could still be liable for fees related to infringement in the range of $7 billion.  

Imagine setting sail on a vast ocean, marked by established sea routes governed by mighty, seasoned mariners. These old sea dogs, with their extensive map collections (akin to patents), dominate the waters, leaving little room for new explorers. This is the situation young companies often find themselves in when chartering into territories monopolized by a few dominant players. The networking industry, ruled by giants like Cisco, Huawei, Juniper, Nokia, and Ericsson, mirrors this vast ocean. The waters are thick with “patent thickets” – tangled masses of patent claims, making it hard for fresh-faced voyagers to navigate without infringing on existing patents. Moreover, the sea is marked by “standardization” lighthouses, which while guiding ships towards interoperability and quality, impose limitations on the course of innovation. These beacons can also increase the cost of compliance, posing as formidable reefs blocking the path of emerging vessels.

Surveys conducted independent of litigation have had mixed success in court. These surveys have been offered as evidence of customer confusion in false advertising cases, intellectual property value in patent cases, consumer behavior in antitrust cases, and plaintiff identification in class actions. In some cases, non-litigation surveys have been admitted as useful evidence on important questions for which data are scarce; in others, they have been excluded as irrelevant or unreliable.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has granted a rare en banc review of its January, 2023, decision in LKQ Corporation v. GM Global Technology Operations, which affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruling that LKQ failed to show by a preponderance of the evidence that GM’s design patent was anticipated or would have been obvious. U.S. Patent D855,508 covers a “vehicle front skid bar.” In its January decision, the Federal Circuit explained that “applying the tests established in Rosen and Durling, the Board found that LKQ failed to identify a sufficient primary reference, and therefore failed to prove obviousness by a preponderance of the evidence.

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision in Medytox, Inc. v. Galderma S.A. affirming a final written decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) invalidating Medytox’s patent claims covering methods for treating patients with botulinum toxin and denying a revised motion to amend patent claims. On appeal, the Federal Circuit rebuffed several challenges, including an Administrative Procedures Act (APA) challenge to the PTAB’s motion to amend pilot program, holding that the PTAB’s change in claim construction was not arbitrary or capricious, nor did it prevent Medytox from litigating construction issues.

Last week was a big one for the potential future of the U.S. patent system. The deadline for comments on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on “Discretionary Institution Practices, Petition Word-Count Limits, and Settlement Practices for America Invents Act Trial Proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board [PTAB]” was Tuesday, June 20…. Then, on Thursday, Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Coons (D-DE), with some help from their colleagues, introduced two new bills that would have major implications for patent eligibility law and PTAB practices, respectively. Below are some other perspectives from a range of IP stakeholders.

The UK High Court today issued an Approved Judgment in Interdigital Technology Corporation & Ors v Lenovo Group Ltd [2023] EWHC 1578 (Pat). While Lenovo was declared the “overall winner,” InterDigital was awarded interest, increasing their previous award by $46.2 million. In March, the Hon. Mr Justice Mellor issued a judgment ordering Lenovo to pay InterDigital a lump sum of $138.7 million for a global FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) license covering sales of cellular devices from 2007 to December 31, 2023. It was the second full FRAND trial to be decided by the UK courts, following the landmark Unwired Planet case.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied the petitions for certiorari in a number of IP cases today, including three the U.S. Solicitor General had recommended rejecting. In Genius v. Google, ML Genius Holdings (Genius) attempted to sue Google for posting song lyrics from its website in Google search results. Genius’s petition asked the High Court to answer the question of whether the Copyright Act’s preemption clause allows a business “to invoke traditional state-law contract remedies to enforce a promise not to copy and use its content?”

On Wednesday, June 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled in a nonprecedential opinion that a Florida district court correctly dismissed a UK-based patent owner’s infringement case after he willfully disobeyed the court and disrupted the enforcement of a court order. The ruling is the second time that the UK resident, Yoldas Askan, lost a patent infringement lawsuit against FARO Technologies. Askan first sued FARO, alleging that the firm’s 3D scanner product infringed on claims in three of his U.S. patents. In the first case, Askan was sanctioned twice by the court and failed to respond to a court order demanding that he show cause.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning in Amgen v. Sanofi upholds the Federal Circuit’s longstanding requirement to enable the full scope of a claimed invention. Since the Patent Act of 1790, patent law has required describing inventions with such clarity and specificity as to enable one skilled in the art to make and use the claimed invention. Moreover, the Court has consistently held that a patent fails to satisfy the enablement requirement if a person having ordinary skill must engage in undue experimentation to practice the claimed invention. The Federal Circuit has gone a step further, requiring that patents enable the full scope of a claimed invention. Amgen is a ratification of this aspect of the Federal Circuit’s enablement jurisprudence.

Recovering money from users of technology requires movement on the part of inventors of technology. For example, receiving compensation from those who use patented designs without permission often requires patent owners (e.g., inventors) to send cease and desist letters, file complaints in federal district court, and at times endure patent litigation to its completion. All of these movements require the inventor to possess a patent. In this manner, one way to view the patent is as a vehicle in commerce.

The impact of the long-awaited launch of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is hard to overstate. While litigators and patent portfolio managers are immediately feeling the impact in Europe, surprisingly, they should also expect an impact on information disclosure statement (IDS) strategy for U.S. patent applications. To understand the impact, this article provides a background on how the European Patent Office (EPO) and UPC consider earlier national rights, how patent applicants can address earlier national rights to prevent invalidation at the UPC, how earlier national rights identified in a European patent application can affect a U.S. application and should be addressed in an IDS, and how this information can be used for monetization and litigation.   

In what may foreshadow upcoming changes to case allocations in the Western District of Texas, Judge Alan Albright of the Waco Division appears to have revived his former practice of retaining cases transferred from the Waco Division to the Austin Division following granted Section 1404 motions (i.e., convenience transfers). In his first years on the bench, Judge Albright habitually retained cases transferred out of Waco to the “sister” Austin Division on his personal docket. As one of the more notable examples, all three of the (much-covered) VLSI v. Intel litigations were transferred to Austin and retained by Judge Albright; two of the three cases were then retransferred back to Waco to allow trial to timely proceed, notwithstanding COVID-related closures in Austin.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled in a precedential decision Wednesday that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) was correct to affirm a United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) examiner’s finding that the claims of U.S. Patent Application 15/131,442 were obvious in view of the prior art. The patent application was filed by John Couvaras and covers a method of reducing high blood pressure. The examiner rejected the claims as “not patentable because they naturally flowed from the claimed administration of the known antihypertensive agents,” specifically, a GABA-a agonist and an Angiotensin II Receptor Blocker (ARB). Couvaras conceded during prosecution that Couvaras that GABA-a agonists and ARBs “have been known as essential hypertension treatments for many, many decades” but appealed to the PTAB on the ground that the prostacyclin—a naturally occurring compound in the body that acts as an anticoagulant and vasodilator—increase was unexpected. Couvaras also argued that objective indicia overcame any existing prima facie case of obviousness.