In a case involving application of the “first-filed action” doctrine and transfer, the district court in the Eastern District of Texas transferred a case as to one defendant but severed and kept the case as to two other defendants. One of the defendants in Texas, Interwoven, began the litigation, not…
The written description requirement is of heightened importance in determining the priority date for continuation patent applications. Without a sufficient written description that supports and details the claims of the patent, the priority date of the parent patent may be lost for the continuation application. This issue was recently addressed…
The district court determined that plaintiff had waived the attorney-client privilege because the plaintiff’s in-house counsel revealed too much information in answering questions during a deposition. The defendants raised the waiver issue in the context of a motion to compel by contending that the plaintiff’s in-house counsel’s answers during a…
In another decision involving sanctions for defendants failure to provide discovery, the district court for the Western District of Michigan granted plaintiff’s motion for default judgment. The default was granted because the defendant had not participated in discovery. As the district court stated, “Defendants have not participated in discovery, but…
In a recent case in the Eastern District of Texas, the district court addressed the admissibility of a consumer survey to show demand for the patented features in accused products. The district court rejected plaintiff’s consumer surveys and granted the defendants’ motion to exclude plaintiff’s survey experts because the surveys…
It is well settled law that all inventors who contribute to an invention must be named on the patent application. Nonetheless, where there are many inventors who contribute to the conceptions and reduction to practice of an invention, it can be difficult to determine who should be listed as the…
After a serious delay by the defendant in providing discovery, the district court granted plaintiff’s motion to strike the defendant’s answer and enter a default judgment. The district court found that the defendant continually mislead the plaintiff and the court regarding its discovery obligations and caused the case to be…
In a recent decision from the Federal Circuit, In Re Mostafazadeh, Case No. 2010-1260 (Fed. Cir. May 3, 2011), the Federal Circuit affirmed the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences’ (the “Board”) decision upholding the patent examiner’s rejection of certain claims of a reissue patent application. The Federal Circuit affirmed…
In yet another multi-defendant case, a district court has severed defendants from a patent infringement suit brought by a plaintiff against many defendants. In this case, the plaintiff brought suit against eleven defendants for infringing the same four patents. The district court granted defendants’ motion to sever because the plaintiff…
Creating a circuit split with the Ninth and Tenth Circuits, the Federal Circuit drew a distinction between efforts directed toward commercialization of a patent and those efforts directed toward enforcement of a patent. The former contacts were held to be irrelevant to the personal jurisdiction analysis, while the latter contacts…