On summary judgment, the district court determined that the defendants directly infringed all patents at issue in the lawsuit. The district court subsequently conduct a bench trial on issues of willfulness and on defendants’ equitable defenses, particularly whether the defenses of laches and equitable estoppel provided a defense to the…
Articles Posted by Stan Gibson
Common Legal Interest Doctrine Saves Privileged Documents from Production Where Parties Contemplated an Acquisition of Patents
Plaintiff moved to compel the production of documents that were listed on the defendants’ privilege logs. The district court explained the disputed documents as follows: “The disputed documents at issue were either authored by Ablation Frontiers, Inc.’s (“AFI”) outside counsel for AFI, or Medtronic’s outside counsel for Medtronic. The documents…
Interwoven v. Vertical Computer Systems: Motion to Stay Pending Reexamination Denied Where Alleged Infringer Filed Declaratory Judgment Action to Initiate Litigation and Then Participated in Litigation Through the Markman Hearing
Interwoven moved to stay all proceedings pending the outcome of an ex parte reexamination of the two patents-in-suit. Interwoven asserted that a stay was warranted because the defendant appeared unprepared to litigate and a reexamination would likely modify the issues in the case, with no undue burden to the defendant.…
Apple Invalidates Two Claims of NetAirus’ Patent But Faces Trial on Two Others: NetAirus v. Apple
Plaintiff NetAirus Technologies (“NetAirus”) contended that Apple was infringing U.S. Patent No, 7,103,380 (the “‘380 Patent”), which pertains to a method in which a handset device communicates wirelessly over both local area networks and wide area networks. NetAirus claimed that the iPhone 3G and later models infringed the ‘380 Patent…
Request for Sanctions for Spoliation Denied Where Plaintiff Failed to Bring the Spoliation Issue to the Court’s Attention for Four Months and Waited Until the Eve of Trial
Plaintiff Schering Corp. (“Schering”) filed a patent infringement action against Apotex Inc. (“Apotex”). Schering brought a motion contending that Apotex spoliated relevant evidence. The motion was based on the omission of allegedly relevant evidence from Apotex’ expert report. The expert report was served in October 2011 and Schering notified Apotex…
Robocast v. Apple/Microsoft: Transfer Motion Denied Where Plaintiff’s Choice of Forum Was Given Deference and the Relative Size and Strength of the Parties Weighed Against Transfer
In two separate actions, Robocast sued Apple and Microsoft for patent infringement. Apple responded by filing a motion to transfer and Microsoft subsequently filed a similar motion to transfer. Both complaints are centered on U.S. Patent No. 7,155,451 (the “‘451 Patent”), which is directed toward an “Automated Browsing System for…
Tactical Decision to Exclude Royalty Rate from Expert Report Causes Court to Preclude Defendant from Arguing Royalty Rate to the Jury
In this patent infringement action, the defendant, Varian Medical Systems, provided an expert report on damages that did not state a royalty rate for the accused products. The district court termed this a tactical decision. “By the way of background, Defendant Varian made the tactical decision to have its expert…
Affirmative Defense for Invalidity Dismissed Where Affirmative Defenses Were Plead in the Disjunctive and Did Not Put Plaintiff on Proper Notice
Plaintiff, Ferring B.V., filed a patent infringement action against Watson Laboratory, Inc. (“Watson Labs”) for tranexamic acid tablets sold under the trademark Lysteda. Watson Labs applied to the FDA for permission to manufacture and sell generic tranexamic acid tablets. Watson Labs filed a counterclaim and answer, including an assertion that…
Direct Infringement Action Against Time Warner and DirecTV Dismissed Where Plaintiff Failed to Plead Sufficient Allegations of Infringement
K Tech Telecommunications (“K Tech”) filed patent infringement actions against Time Warner and DirecTV. DirecTV and Time Warner moved to dismiss the patent infringement complaint for failure to state a claim or, in the alternative, for a more definite statement. K Tech owns several patents that are directed toward particular…
Covenant Not to Sue Contains an Implied License Barring Infringement Claims and Cannot Be Revoked After Reliance
The parties, ICOS Vision Systems and Scanner Technologies, have been involved in patent litigation against one another for over ten years. The patents at issue concern technology used to inspect electronic packaging and one of the patents involved the use of ball grid arrays that provide a method of securing…