Plaintiff Personal Audio, LLC (“Personal Audio”) filed a patent infringement action against Apple, Inc. (“Apple”) over two patents, which teach an audio program player that will play a sequence of audio program files and accept commands from the user to skip forward or backward in the sequence. After a jury…
Articles Posted in E.D. Texas
Transfer Motion Denied Even Where Defendants Consent to Jurisdiction in the Proposed Transferee District
In a recent case in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the court denied defendants’ motion to transfer the case to the District of New Jersey. The court’s analysis focused primarily on whether the case could have originally been filed in the District of New…
Sanctions Granted for Repeated Discovery Misconduct and Attorneys’ Fees Awarded for Counsel’s Fabricated E-Mail
Plaintiff brought a patent infringement action alleging direct infringement of a single patent. The defendant, a corporation, sought an extension of time to respond to the complaint through a request from its CEO. Because corporations cannot represented themselves and must instead be represented by a licensed attorney, the district court…
Retirement of Texas Judges Leads to Transfer Out of Texas
In a patent case brought by Plaintiff Rembrandt Vision Technologies, L.P. (“Rembrandt”) against Defendant Johnson & Johnson Vision Care, Inc. (“J&J”) in the Eastern District of Texas, J&J moved to transfer the case to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Central to the Judge Ward’s…
Transfer Motion Denied Where Defendants Did Not Show That Case Could Have Been Filed in Proposed Transferee Jurisdiction
Defendants moved to transfer a multi-defendant patent infringement case from the Eastern District of Texas to the Eastern District of Michigan. The defendants asserted that transfer was appropriate under 28 U.S.C. §1404(a) due to factors of convenience. The plaintiff opposed the motion on the ground that the defendants had not…
Trial By Ambush Not Tolerated In Texas
A Texas Court recently granted a plaintiff’s motion to strike the defendant’s non-infringement theory based on the defendant’s failure to previously disclose it. At trial, the defendant attempted to elicit testimony from the plaintiff’s expert witness that the accused website did not infringe, in light of the way it operated.…
Damage Experts’ Opinions Excluded Where Experts Did Not Establish Link Between License and the Patent-In-Suit
In a recent decision from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the court granted in pat and denied in part plaintiff’s motion to exclude the expert testimony of defendants’ damage experts. Plaintiff argued that the opinions of defendants’ experts were unreliable and used flawed methodologies…
Summary Judgment on Indefiniteness Denied Where Claims Reciting Term of “Engine for” Was Not a Means-Plus-Function Term
Defendant contended that several claims of a patent were indefinite under 35 U.S.C. §112, ¶2. The defendant argued that the term “engine for” should be construed under §112, ¶6 because engine is only discussed in functional terms. The defendant also argued that the term “engine for” did not connote sufficient…
Expert Survives Daubert Challenge on Entire Market Value Theory
In a recent decision from the Eastern District of Texas, the court allowed the testimony of an expert witness on the entire market value theory even though the expert did not provide evidence of consumer demand. The court found that the expert could use the entire market value theory of…
Applying Therasense Court Denies Defense Motion of Inequitable Conduct
In the first district court case applying the Federal Circuit’s new standard for proving inequitable conduct, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas concluded that defendants had failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that the patents-in-suit were unenforceable due to inequitable conduct. The case…