MPHJ: Just a Flesh Wound

We’ve spoken before about MPHJ, the posterchild for patent abuse, which sent letters to tens of thousands of ordinary businesses using scanner-printers, seeking royalty payments. States from Vermont to Nebraska were sufficiently incensed to take direct action, kicking off a trend of interest in these types of cases among state attorneys general. (Most recently, we took a look at Virginia‘s new unit).

Hewlett Packard, not surprisingly, saw MPHJ as a threat to its business, and filed an action with the PTO seeking to invalidate each and every claim of MPHJ’s U.S. Patent No. 6,771,381. Largely successful in this effort – each claim was found to be invalid except for unlucky number 13 – HP pressed its point with the Federal Circuit, seeking a clean sweep.

The Federal Circuit recently affirmed the result (and found that it could not review the PTO’s decision not to institute an examination of one of HP’s arguments), leaving claim 13 bloody but still standing.

It will be interesting to see if MPHJ attempts to seek any further mileage out of what has been one of the uglier patent fights in recent memory.