Articles Posted in District Courts

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Innovention Toys, LLC prevailed in a patent infringement action against MGA Entertainment. After the Court entered a final judgment, the parties agreed that execution of the judgment should be pending resolution of post-judgment motions and appeal but disagreed regarding the amount Defendant MGA should deposit with the district court as security.

MGA argued that it should only deposit the amount of the judgment plus one year of post-judgment interest at 0.10%. Innovention asserted that MGA should deposit the amount of the judgment plus 20%, citing Local Rule 62.2.
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Plaintiffs filed a motion to permit them to file an affidavit, along with billing documents, under seal. The affidavit, along with its exhibits, was forty-seven pages in length. In the motion, the Plaintiffs contend that “the fees charged for each attorney as well as information contained in the time entries are confidential and private financial information of Plaintiffs and Plaintiffs’ counsel and is not publicly available information.” The district court stated that the Plaintiffs did not cite any case law in support of their position.

The district court then examined the relevant local rules. Local Rule 26.2 states: “Except as otherwise provided by statute, rule, or order, all pleadings and other papers of any nature filed with the Court (“Court Records”) shall become a part of the public record of this Court.” E.D. Tenn. L.R. 26.2(a). In order to seal any part of the record, a party must show good cause. E.D. Tenn. L.R. 26.2(b).
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Plaintiff Trading Technologies International, Inc. (“TT”) moved to strike the invalidity expert report of the defendant, CQG. TT made two arguments its motion: “(1) that Dr. Mellor failed to conduct a proper written description analysis because, according to TT, he incorrectly focuses on features that are not recited in the claims and concludes that there is no written description to support the unclaimed features; and (2) that Dr. Mellor failed to consider the perspective of one of ordinary skill in the art in his written description analysis.”

CQG responded that TT mischaracterized Dr. Mellor’s opinions and that Dr. Mellor correctly applied the written description test to determine whether a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand whether the inventors were in possession of TT’s asserted Static Limitation. CQG further asserted that TT misrepresented Dr. Mellor’s explanation of a person of ordinary skill in the art and offered no explanation why the district court should adopt TT’s definition.
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Plaintiff Nu Flow Technologies (2000) Inc. (“Nu Flow) filed a patent infringement action against Defendant A.O. Reed & Company (“A.O. Reed”) and ten Doe defendants based on two patents U.S. Patent No. 7,849,883 B2 (the ‘883 patent) and U.S. Patent No. 6,691,741 132 (the ‘741 patent). The ‘883 patent, entitled “Liner Assembly for Pipeline Repair and Methods of Installing Same,” claims a liner assembly used to repair a pipeline. The ‘741 patent, entitled “Installation Assemblies for Pipeline Liners, Pipeline Liners and Methods for Installing the Same,” claims an installation assembly and a method for installing a liner in a pipeline.

A.O. Reed moved to dismiss the complaint, arguing that the Complaint should be dismissed because Nu Flow’s allegations of joint infringement fail to meet the pleading standard of Twombly and Iqbal. Joint infringement exists only “if one party exercises control or direction over the entire process such that every step is attributable to the controlling party, i.e., the mastermind.” Muniauction, Inc. v. Thomson Corp., 532 F.3d 1318, 1329 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (internal quotation marks omitted).
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Digital Ally, Inc. (“Digital Ally”) filed a declaratory judgment action pertaining to patent infringement against Utility Associates, Inc. (“Utility”). Utility filed a motion to dismiss for lack of subject matter and personal jurisdiction.

Digital Ally is a Nevada corporation with its principal place of business in Kansas. It sells advanced digital video systems to consumers, including law enforcement agencies, across the country. Utility, which is a competitor of Digital Ally, is incorporated in Delaware and has its principal place of business in Georgia. Utility has no offices in Kansas and none of its employees or sales agents reside in Kansas. Utility is not registered to do business in Kansas, but it does sell some products to a few customers in Kansas.
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Plaintiff filed a patent infringement action and also filed an application to proceed in pro per and In Forma Pauperis. The defendants file a motion to dismiss the action based on false statements in the application.

As the district court explained, “[t]he Application requires the applicant to detail all sources of income he has received within the last twelve months and to declare under penalty of perjury that all of the information provided is true. The Declaration further notes that the applicant understands that a false statement may result in a dismissal of the claims.”
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In this patent infringement case, the district court received a number of motions to strike portions of expert reports and to exclude the testimony of certain experts. As stated by the district court, it received the following: “Defendants’ Motion to Strike Portions of the Expert Report and Exclude the Testimony of Richard Belgard Regarding Infringement by Systematically Reseeding Pseudorandom Number Generators” [#247 filed January 27, 2014]; plaintiffs “Motion to Exclude Testimony of Dell Expert Witness Dr. Markus Jakobsson” [#252 filed January 31, 2014]; the “Defendants’ Motion to Strike Portions of the Expert Report and Exclude the Testimony of Dr. Stephen Melvin Regarding Statistical Confidence Levels” [#254 filed February 3, 2014]; “Defendant Dell Inc.’ s Sealed Motion to Exclude the Proposed Expert Testimony of Robert Mills” [#258 filed February 5, 2014]; and plaintiffs “Sealed Motion to Exclude the Proposed Expert Testimony of Stephen Magee” [#266 filed February 13, 2014].
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In this patent infringement action, Potter Voice submitted an expert declaration of David Klausner for the purpose of claim construction. Microsoft moved to exclude the declaration under Fed.R.Evid. 702.

The district court explained the background of the patent as follows: In 1998, United States patent number 5,729,659 (the ‘659 patent) was issued to Jerry L. Potter. Plaintiff, Potter voice Technologies LLC, now owns the ‘659 patent. The ‘659 patent describes a method and apparatus for controlling a digital computer using oral input. The patent infringement claims alleged in Potter’s complaint are based on four distinct software products: (1) BlackBerry Voice Commands; (2) Google Voice Search; (3) Google Voice Actions; and (4) Windows Speech Commands. Potter alleges that the defendants infringe the ‘659 patent when these software products are used on mobile phones.
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Sonic Industry (“Sonic”) filed a patent infringement action against iRobot Corporation (“iRobot”). iRobot filed an Answer and Affirmative Defenses to the patent infringement complaint. The district court issued a memorandum order sua sponte because of some “problematic aspects of that responsive pleading.”

The district court noted that iRobot had regularly “coupled its invocation of the disclaimer made available under appropriate circumstances by Fed. R. Civ. P. (“Rule”) 8(b)(5) with the language ‘and, therefore, denies those allegations.'” The district court found that these answers were problematic. “But it is of course oxymoronic for a party to assert (presumably in good faith) that it lacks even enough information to form a belief as to the truth of an allegation, then proceed to deny it. Because such a denial is at odds with the pleader’s obligations under Rule 11(b), the quoted language is stricken from each of those paragraphs of the Answer.”
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After trial and the denial of post-trial motions, AT&T Operations, Inc. (“AT&T”) filed motion to extend the time to file a notice of appeal pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a). AT&T argued that the e-mail notice of electronic filings (NEF’s) that defense counsel received did not provide them with “notice” that Defendants’ substantive post-trial motions had been resolved. To make this argument, AT&T noted that the e-mail notifications defense counsel received only contained language regarding the district court’s grant of their motions for leave to file sealed documents, but failed to mention the denial of their substantive post-trial motions, which was provided in the same orders. Nonetheless, the district court noted that AT&T did, however, receive e-mail notifications that the Court had entered an order on Plaintiff’s bill of costs and had denied Defendants’ motion for new trial and JMOL on invalidity which were not sealed pleadings.

AT&T also argued that the docket entries for the orders at issue were modified two days later to reflect the denial of the substantive post-trial motions, but no new electronic notices were sent by the district court’s electronic case filing (ECF) system to reflect these amended docket entries. Accordingly, AT&T contended that based on the NEFs they received, counsel believed the motions for JMOL and new trial on damages and non-infringement had not been disposed of and remained pending before the Court. As a result, AT&T claimed that it “did not receive sufficient notice of the substance of the orders entered justifies reopening the time to file an appeal.”
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