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Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP is pleased to announce that Joseph J. Mellema has joined the Firm as Of Counsel in the Patent Litigation Group. Mellema will be resident in the Firm’s Orange County office.

Mellema focuses on the protection and enforcement of all intellectual property rights, including patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, unfair business practices, and antitrust litigation. He has dual degrees in electrical engineering and physical sciences, and was formerly a systems engineer at Raytheon Company working on next-generation sensors and systems for the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet.

“Joe has experience litigating highly technical patents in a variety of industries, making him a great addition to our team,” said Stan Gibson, chair of the Patent Litigation Group. “Our patent litigation attorneys have a deep understanding, and often first-hand experience, with the technologies our clients rely on us to protect.”
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Posted in: News
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In this patent infringement action, the Defendant moved for dismissal based on collateral estoppel and Alice contending that a prior district court had found the patents invalid for lack of patentable subject matter. Before applying the two-step Alice test, the district court took “judicial notice of the fact that Patent ‘046 was found invalid in Joao Control & Monitoring Systems, LLC v. Telular Corp., — F. Supp. 3d –, 2016 WL 1161287 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 23, 2016).

In analyzing the collateral estoppel issue, the district court noted that “the Supreme Court has held that a defense of issue preclusion applies where a party is ‘facing a charge of infringement of a patent that has once been declared invalid,’ even though the party asserting the defense was not a party to the action where the patent was invalidated.” Soverain Software LLC v. Victoria’s Secret Direct Brand Mgmt., LLC, 778 F.3d 1311, 1315 (Fed. Cir. 2015) (quoting Blonder-Tongue Labs., Inc. v. Univ. of Ill. Found., 402 U.S. 313, 349-50 (1971)).
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In earlier patent infringement litigation, the Plaintiff sued Ancestry.com DNA, LLC (“Ancestry”) in the District of Delaware (“Delaware litigation”) alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Number 8,221,381 (the “‘381 patent”). Ancestry subsequently filed an IPR seeking review of several claims of the ‘381 patent, and the PTAB issued an institution decision finding that Ancestry “ha[d] demonstrated a reasonable likelihood that it would prevail in showing that claims 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15-17, 20, 41, 44, and 49 of the ‘381 patent are unpatentable.”
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In this patent infringement action, the defendant, High 5 Games (“High 5”), moved for an order overruling the plaintiff’s, Konami Gaming, Inc. (“Konami”), objection to an expert witness viewing confidential information. In the alternative, High 5 moved to amend the stipulated protective order signed by the parties.

As explained by the district court, the stipulated protective order entered into by the parties stated that for purposes of access to confidential documents, an “expert” is “a person with specialized knowledge or experience in a matter pertinent to the litigation who . . . is not a past or current employee of a Party or of a Party’s competitor.”
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Posted in: Discovery
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DraftKings filed a motion to stay discovery until the district court had an opportunity to rule on the a motion to dismiss. The motion to dismiss asserted that all of the ten patents-in-suit were invalid because they claimed patent-ineligible subject matter. CG Technology opposed the motion.

The district court began its analysis by noting that the Federal Rules do not provide for automatic or blanket stays of discovery when a potentially dispositive motion is pending. Tradebay, LLC v. eBay, Inc., 278 F.R.D. 597 (D. Nev. 2011) (citation omitted). But the district court also noted that as a general matter, courts have broad discretionary power to control discovery. See e.g., Little v. City of Seattle, 863 F.2d 681, 685 (9th Cir. 1988). In determining whether to stay discovery, and in light of the directive in Rule 1 to construe the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in a manner to “secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action,” the preferred approach is that set forth previously in Twin City Fire Insurance v. Employers of Wausau, 124 F.R.D. 652 (D. Nev. 1989).
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Posted in: Discovery
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In this long standing litigation between Oracle and Google, a dispute arose over the protective order and whether the disclosure of certain information violated the terms of the protective order when it was disclosed in open court. The district court explained that “[b]y long tradition, when a lawyer wishes to reveal in open court information whose disclosure is restricted by a protective order, the lawyer must first explain the restriction to the judge and (i) ask to seal the courtroom and transcript or (ii) hand up a copy of the restricted information to the judge.”

The district court then acknowledge that this practice “is not explicitly stated in our model protective order (or in the similar protective order adopted in this case), but this practice necessarily flows from the restrictions that are explicit, namely a limited list of allowed recipients that plainly omits the public. Of course, ‘the court and its personnel’ are usually allowed recipients but that phrase does not mean ‘the court, its personnel, and the public.’ Otherwise, the recipe for Coca-Cola or any other highly private information could be blurted out in open court. No one has ever claimed otherwise — until this case.”
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In this patent infringement action, the plaintiff sought production of the defendant’s document retention and document destruction policies. The defendant asserted that the request sought information protected by work product and attorney-client privilege. The plaintiff argued that the documents were merely corporate policies that could not be privileged.

The district court analyzed the issue by reviewing the court’s Default Discovery Standards and concluded that these policies are protected under those standards.
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The Plaintiffs filed a patent infringement action against the defendant, Netskope, accusing Netskope of infringing U.S. Patent Number 7,305,707 (the “707 Patent”). Netskope filed a motion for judgment on the pleadings, which the district court granted finding that the asserted claims for the 707 Patent were unpatentable abstract ideas. The district court subsequently entered judgment in favor of Netskope, invalidating the ‘707 Patent.

After the Plaintiffs filed an appeal with the Federal Circuit, the parties settled the case and the Federal Circuit remanded the case back to the district court. The Plaintiffs then filed an unopposed motion to vacate the district court’s judgment invalidating the ‘707 Patent.
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The plaintiff, Shipping and Transit, LLC (“Plaintiff”), filed a patent infringement action against Defendant Neptune Cigars, Inc. (“Defendant”), for infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,415,207 (“the ‘207 Patent”) and 6,763,299 (“the ‘299 Patent”). The Defendant filed a motion to dismiss on the ground that the patents are directed to ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101.

Instead of opposing the motion to dismiss on the merits, the Plaintiff issued a covenant not to sue to the defendant. The Plaintiff then argued that the covenant not to sue removed any actual controversy between the parties and that the case should be dismissed based on a lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
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In this patent infringement action between Finjan and Sophos, the district court had previously granted a motion to exclude Finjan’s damage expert. The district court explained that the expert’s, Layne-Farrar, “method of applying a royalty rate to an apportioned base for each patent and adding the resulting royalties was not reliable because under her apportionment method she had attributed the full value of certain features of Sophos’s products to multiple patents and so had counted the value of these features multiple times.”

The district court concluded that this methodology “functioned to inflate Layne-Farrar’s royalty base and her final damages calculation.” Nonetheless, the district court permitted the expert to submit a supplemental report. Sophos then moved to exclude the supplemental report as well.
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Posted in: Damages
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