Latest News & Alerts

A Question Of Law

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...

Not Over Until Its Over…

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...

Litigation “Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing”

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...

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...