IP Wise

Making Business Wise About Intellectual Property Litigation

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Perfect 10 Put to Bed

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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,...

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Invalidity Begins At Home

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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...

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

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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...

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Forms That No Longer Function

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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....

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Of Covenants and Certainty

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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...

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Dance of the Districts

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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...

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Whose Line (Of Source Code) Is It Anyway?

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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...

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In re a Googolplex of Documents

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We’ve touched before on the topic of discovery. Like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the world of discovery is “not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” Often gear–grinding, particularly in an infringement case, and causing both in–house counsel and first–year associates to tremble with fear or collapse from boredom, discovery nonetheless can...

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Logically First, But Practically Never?

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The Patently–O blog draws our attention to an opinion of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Dealertrack v. Huber that poses a big question about a big subject: patentable subject matter. Specifically, when should the court consider whether an issued patent is invalid because it does not claim patentable subject matter? That is, is...

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The Chain of Command for Complaints

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The Supreme Court’s twin decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal have stirred up the pot of pleading standards in the years since their issuance. An irritation to every plaintiff’s lawyer, a touchstone to every defendant’s lawyer, Twombly and Iqbal heightened the level of detail required to state a valid claim. Just...

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