Brann, Peter

The (Patented) Ide(a)s of March

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the upcoming patent infringement battle looming between Yahoo! and Facebook, on the eve of Facebook’s IPO. It seems everyone has something to say on the topic (seemingly with the ironic exception of Yahoo!’s Facebook page). Irony coming in twos, one of those with something...

Will This Opinion Drive The Supreme Court To Abstraction?

As we’ve previously reported, in August 2010, a federal district court in Los Angeles ruled that a patent–holder’s claims against Hulu and WildTangent had to be dismissed because the patent asserted was directed at the abstract idea of requiring visitors to view advertisements before being able to access free online content. In September 2011, the...

Unlucky Horseshoes for Patent Plaintiff

The usual rule in American civil litigation is that each side pays its own attorneys regardless of who wins in the end. The patent statute provides, however, that a losing party will have to pay the winning party’s fees in an “exceptional” case. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has set the bar high for...

Perfect 10 Put to Bed

Just a brief follow up on our post last August about softcore porn website Perfect 10, which was denied a preliminary injunction by the Ninth Circuit against Google, following Google’s display of thumbnail images of Perfect 10’s photographs. The news of note at the time was the Ninth’s Circuit’s adoption of eBay Inc. v. MercExchange,...

Invalidity Begins At Home

In what we hope will come as a refreshing change of pace, today’s blog features neither a legislative amendment nor a judicial opinion, but, rather, a recent article in Slate.com relating to the success of Article One Partners, a firm that has turned the traditional world of prior art searches on its head. The phrase...

Patent–Owner Force–Feeding Facebooking Presidential Candidates Its Patent Medicine

We couldn’t help but notice a patent complaint filed by an outfit called EveryMD in a Los Angeles court naming Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum as defendants. According to the complaint, it appears that Newt, Mitt, and Rick are Facebook business account holders (along with 4,000,000 others). And by using...

Forms That No Longer Function

Patent litigation runs on rules—specifically, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the local rules of individual federal courts where patent cases are filed. When two rules collide, what gives? To state a claim for patent infringement (or any other civil claim), a plaintiff must make a short plain statement of the claim under Fed....

Of Covenants and Certainty

We’ve certainly spoken before about retailers and their vendors, or distributors and their suppliers, or any other circumstance where a defendant is sued on an infringement claim for a product or service provided by someone else. We comment on an interesting decision out of the Southern District of New York, concerning parties evidently engaged in...

Dance of the Districts

Like our colleagues, we at IP Wise received LegalMetric’s latest email blast with patent–related statistics, and noted the striking fact that all six of the top judges (in terms of number of patent cases filed in 2011) were located either in Texas (Davis, Folsom, Gilstrap) or in Delaware (Sleet, Stark, Robinson). Each judge had over 100...

Whose Line (Of Source Code) Is It Anyway?

While almost every business relies on the Internet these days for commercial purposes—making sales, tracking orders, providing customer service—that does not mean that every business is in the business of software development. Most e–commerce source code, for example, is not home–grown, or at least not exclusively home grown. Once you’ve been sued for patent infringement...