After Single Touch Interactive, Inc. (“Single Touch”) and Zoove Corporation (“Zoove”) reached a settlement in their patent infringement action, both parties filed a stipulated motion to vacate the district court’s previous claim construction order. The parties’ settlement agreement provided that they would jointly request that the district court vacate the claim construction order.
In analyzing the parties’ joint request, the district court began by focusing on the United State Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. Bancorp Mortgage Co. v. Bonner Mall P’ship, 513 U.S. 18 (1994) where “the Supreme Court held that appellate court vacatur of district court judgments in the context of settlement agreements should be granted only in ‘exceptional circumstances,’ which ‘do not include the mere fact that the settlement agreement provides for vacatur.’ The Supreme Court emphasized the public interests at stake in considering a request to vacate an order or judgment of the court, stating that ‘[j]udicial precedents are presumptively correct and valuable to the legal community as a whole… not merely the property of private litigants[,] and should stand unless a court concludes that the public interest would be served by a vacatur.’ Id. at 26 (quoting Izumi Seimitsu Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha v. U.S. Philips Corp., 510 U.S. 27, 40 (1993) (Stevens, J., dissenting)).
Continue reading