WildTangent’s Wild Ride Back To The Federal Circuit

In a five–line order this morning, the Supreme Court hit the reset button on the patent dispute between Ultramercial and WildTangent. Recall that in August 2010, a district court in the Central District of California dismissed Ultramercial’s case against Hulu and WildTangent, concluding that the Ultramercial patent at issue was invalid on its face because...

What Does It Mean To “Like” Ike?

A seemingly trivial act—“liking” the Facebook page of one candidate for sheriff—allegedly cost two employees their jobs when the other guy won the election. And a Virginia federal court has now ruled that the election–winner did not violate those employees’ First Amendment rights when he fired them. As reported on arstechnica, two employees of the...

Megatron v. Googlezilla

If you have even a passing interest in IP litigation or Internet logjams, you’ll no doubt have heard about the pitched battle between Oracle and Google over Android, Google’s mobile operating system. Earlier this week, a jury in the Northern District of California found that Google violated copyright laws when it used Java APIs to...

A Plaintiff Walks a Bunch of Defendants Into a Bar…

Have you heard the one about the multi–defendant patent case? The one where a single plaintiff sues dozens of unrelated companies for patent infringement together in the same case on the theory that being accused of infringing the same patent creates enough common issues of law and fact to bind those defendants together in a...

The First State

Delaware, the first state to ratify the constitution, may soon be first in another category: federal district court with the most patent cases. In a guest post on PatentlyO, Professor Paul Janicke of the University of Houston Law Center reports on his study of new patent cases filed from October 1, 2011, through March 31,...

Passing the Buck

A short note on a theme with long legs. We talk, from time to time, about patentability under Section 101. In a recent case out of the Eastern District of Virginia, plaintiff attempted to argue that the question of patentable subject matter—specifically, whether or not the claimed invention was an abstract idea not eligible for...

Small Change

We end a quiet week with a quick word on a short order from Judge Gilstrap of the Eastern District of Texas in the case of Tivo v. Verizon Communications. Under the new regime inaugurated by the America Invents Act, patent–owners cannot name unrelated alleged infringers in the same case just because they believe those...

Supreme Court Wraps Up Its Patent Docket

In its final patent–related opinion of the term, the Supreme Court answered a fairly obscure question in Kappos v. Hyatt: what standard should the district court apply in ruling on an appeal from the Patent Office’s denial of a patent application. Under 35 U.S.C. § 145, a disappointed patent applicant can take his or her...

NPEs By The Numbers

We read with interest the report of Article One Partners (HT: IPWatchdog), regarding the results of a survey pertaining to IP litigation issues across various sectors. While noteworthy on other grounds, we at IP Wise found most interesting the (sobering) statistics pertaining to non–practicing entity a/k/a troll litigation: NPE litigation in the high technology industries...

Is Innovation Another Cost of Defense?

People in the patent and tech communities have strong opinions about patent trolls/non–practicing entities, not even agreeing on what to call them. The moniker “patent troll” reflects the fact that these entities only use the patents they own negatively, i.e., to block other people from engaging in the sphere of productivity allegedly covered by the...