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Internet Titans End Less-Than-Titanic Struggle

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Less virulent than the Smartphone Wars, perhaps because the road has been a bit more traveled, the months-old struggle between Internet granddaddy Yahoo! and teenage Facebook has come to an apparently mutually-satisfying conclusion. According to a joint statement, the parties reached a settlement not only to resolve the patent infringement claims between them, but also...

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Independence Day Innovations

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We’ve called attention before to Article One Partners, an entity taking advantage of the global communication network to develop a more grass roots approach to prior art searching in patent cases. Before sending our readers off for fireworks, flags and frankfurters, we pause briefly to give a nod to Article One’s roster of the Top...

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Another Bite of the Apple

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Apple may have struck out in Illinois in its dispute with Motorola Mobility, but the company seems to be faring much better in the smart phone wars in California, winning a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus—just days after it was awarded a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. With Google heavily involved in both...

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Everything’s Different, Nothing’s Changed

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Perhaps Stephen Sondheim had the America Invents Act in mind when he wrote the lyrics to “Sorry–Grateful” for his show Company: “Everything’s different, nothing’s changed / Only maybe slightly rearranged.” Back in September 2011, Congress created a new statute, 35 U.S.C. § 299, as part of the America Invents Act, intended to prevent plaintiffs from...

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News of Note: Chicago Edition

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First, we would be remiss not to mention that the curtain has closed on Act I of the battle between Apple and Motorola over various smartphone technology. We say “Act I,” because an appeal seems almost inevitable—and it will be interesting to see what the more pro–patent Federal Circuit has to say about Judge Posner’s...

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A Question Of Law

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Patent lawyers generally salivate when the Federal Circuit (first stop for all your patent appellate needs) hands down an opinion. This past week was no exception, with the issuance of Bard Peripheral Vascular, Inc. v. W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc. The upshot of Bard is that the “objective prong” of the test for willful patent...

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Not Over Until Its Over…

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Just a brief update on last week’s post regarding the recent order out of the Northern District of Illinois, canceling the trial set between heavyweights Apple and Motorola Mobility due to the apparent dearth of damages. Instead of the expected order elaborating on Judge Posner’s reasons for scrapping the slugfest, in what could amount to...

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Litigation “Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing”

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As you may have read in last week’s Wall Street Journal, judicial lion Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting by designation in the Northern District of Illinois, threw out what promised to be another titanic smart phone battle between Apple and Google–owned Motorola Mobility. The short two–page order (accessible through the...

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Form Over Substance?

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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...

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Sliding into Irrelevancy

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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”...

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