Latest News & Alerts

Internet Retailers Among Many Submitting Comments on Patent Troll Problem to FTC/DOJ

Following their joint public workshop in December, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have solicited comments from interested parties on the patent troll problem. The comment period closed on April 5, and the FTC is posting comments as they come in here. The agencies have received comments from individual businesses, law professors, local chambers of...

The GeoTag Show

Your bloggers are at the 28th Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference in Arlington, Virginia, and so have not been as garrulous as usual. However, we wanted to take a brief moment to recognize an unusual order in an unusual case. If you’re a retailer, or perhaps if you’ve just ever used a map, you’ve probably...

An Admirable Defense

Not to be outdone by Microsoft’s transparency, Google recently announced that its Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge as follows: “We pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.” It began this initiative by identifying 10 of its patents, but did indicate a plan to expand this pool over time....

Microsoft Makes A List (of Patents), Which You Can Check Twice

Citing its commitment to a “healthy patent ecosystem around the world,” Microsoft has taken the intriguing (possibly bold) step of publishing “a list that includes to the best of our knowledge all issued patents that Microsoft currently owns, either directly or through subsidiaries, along with a tool for assisting in review of the list.” In announcing...

Non–practicing Entities, Domestic Industry, and the ITC

The International Trade Commission has become a popular venue for patent litigation recently. Although the ITC cannot award damages, it can issue orders barring the importation of foreign–made goods into the United States if they are found to infringe a U.S. patent for which there is a “domestic industry,” a concept we’ll return to in a moment. ITC proceedings are difficult...

Fleshing Out the Form Complaint

A short note on a short order that would likely pass without comment—if it weren’t from the Eastern District of Texas. The order—with a mere two paragraphs of analysis—finds Plaintiff’s patent infringement claim lacking in the requisite specificity and requires Plaintiff to re–plead within two weeks. In short, the accusation directed at “visual voicemail products” is too...

Spanning the Globe…News of Note

Highlights of some recent attractions: First Sales Can Be Foreign. In a 6–3 decision in a copyright case, the Supreme Court has held that the “first–sale doctrine” applies to copyrighted works lawfully made abroad. The first–sale doctrine says that the intellectual property rights associated with a copyrighted work are exhausted with the first authorized manufacture or...

Trolls by the Trillions

We wouldn’t practice patent law if we didn’t like statistics, at least a bit—and past blog entries have made that clear. Therefore, it was with much interest that we reviewed the thorough information–gathering of Assistant Professor Colleen Chien (Santa Clara University Law School) on the staggering rise of patent troll litigation. We will let Professor Chien’s comprehensive work speak for...

Presidential Patents

CBS ran a news clip yesterday, regarding the anniversary of Honest Abe’s patent, filed March 10, 1849. The patent, for “buoying vessels over shoals,” was issued two years later, as Patent No. 6469 in our young nation’s history. The writer will confess to a certain academic interest in Presidential trivia, and, inspired by CBS’s lead, will offer a...

Divided We Fall…

Just a short follow up on a head–scratching topic oft on the Federal Circuit’s radar as of late: joint or divided infringement. As alert readers may recall, in Akamai, the Federal Circuit concluded that it was no longer necessary, in order to prove induced infringement, to demonstrate that all steps were committed by a single entity. (A...