Plaintiff Better Mouse Company’s (“Better Mouse”) filed a motion to strike portions of the rebuttal expert report and exclude testimony of Richard Eichmann. Better Mouse asserted that the district court should exclude Mr. Eichmann’s testimony stating that he determined the value of U.S. Patent No. 7,532,200 (the Asserted Patent or ‘200 patent) using forward citation analysis. Better Mouse argued that Mr. Eichmann’s forward citation analysis is flawed because (1) “he failed to count citations to counterpart patents and applications, which share an identical or very similar disclosure”; and (2) “he failed to account for patent families, which are linked either directly or indirectly by a priority document and thus may also disclose the same idea as the related ‘Comparable Patent.'”
Better Mouse asserted that “[t]he Court should strike Mr. Eichmann’s forward citation count because it ignores citations to related patents that disclose the same technology, thereby grossly undercounting the number of relevant forward citations.” Plaintiff argued that the district court should follow Oracle, where the Northern District of California held “that failing to include citation counts to patents (in that case, predecessors to a reissue patent) that have ‘the same specification and drawings’ was a fatal flaw in [an] expert’s forward citation count.” (Dkt. No. 226 at 4 (citing Oracle Am., Inc. v. Google, Inc., No. C 10-03561 WHA, 2012 WL 877125 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 15, 2012).)”
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