Brann, Peter

Form Over Substance?

Today, in In re Bill of Lading Transmission and Processing System Patent Litigation (linked here and reproduced below), the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals gave a divided answer to an arcane question of civil procedure that has real–world consequences to businesses defending patent lawsuits. How much does the plaintiff have to say to state a...

Sliding into Irrelevancy

We’ve touched before on the Zippo test—dating from the dawn of the Internet, Zippo adopts a “sliding–scale” approach to assess whether a defendant may be amenable to suit in a particular forum based on the accessability of its website in that forum. Under Zippo’s worldwide jurisdictional test for the World Wide Web, the website is scrutinized on a scale of interactivity, from “passive”...

Want Source Code? Talk To The Engineer

When your website or other software gets accused of patent infringement, the patent–owner is generally going to want to see “your” source code. Giving up your source code, an Internet company’s life’s blood, can be difficult enough even under the strictest protective order, but that is not the only issue to worry about. It can...

Google’s Other Win This Week

As widely reported in the news media, Google won a victory in its long–running fight with Oracle over Oracle’s intellectual property and Google’s Android operating system. A San Francisco jury cleared Google on all of Oracle’s claims of patent infringement, leaving Oracle with only a relatively small victory on its copyright claims. Meanwhile, in an Atlanta federal district court,...

From On–Sale To Obvious: Kelora Systems Is Twice Bitten By A Prior Product

As reported in Internet Retailer, Kelora Systems, LLC has been actively pursuing a litigation–and–licensing strategy under a patent in the field of parametric search, targeting ecommerce firms of all stripes. A California federal district judge today (again) brought that campaign to a halt, finding (again) that the patent–in–suit was invalid. In a prior suit, the...

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,...