Joshua Landau is the Patent Counsel at the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), where he represents and advises the association regarding patent issues. Mr. Landau joined CCIA from WilmerHale in 2017, where he represented clients in patent litigation, counseling, and prosecution, including trials in both district courts and before the PTAB.
Prior to his time at WilmerHale, Mr. Landau was a Legal Fellow on Senator Al Franken’s Judiciary staff, focusing on privacy and technology issues. Mr. Landau received his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and his B.S.E.E. from the University of Michigan. Before law school, he spent several years as an automotive engineer, during which time he co-invented technology leading to U.S. Patent No. 6,934,140.
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A new bill, introduced by Sens. Coons, Tillis, Hirono, and Cassidy, would give Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers the authority to seize goods at the border if they involve design patent violations. Customs already has this authority for goods that violate copyrights or trademarks. But design patents work differently. Trying to use the same…
Qualcomm’s appeal of the FTC’s success in district court continues to move forward, with the second set of amicus briefs (including CCIA’s) filed the week of Thanksgiving. Qualcomm’s reply brief is due by Friday, December 13th, and oral argument is scheduled for February 13th, 2020. Judge Koh found that Qualcomm had abused its dominant position…
Last week, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Google v. Oracle, preparing to review the Federal Circuit’s decision that application programming interfaces (APIs) are copyrightable and that the replication of an API to implement compatibility is not a fair use. There are numerous legal flaws with the Federal Circuit’s decisions, flaws addressed at length in…
This post, from guest author Jonathan Band, first appeared on the Disruptive Competition Project. While the case addresses sovereign immunity with respect to copyright claims, it directly implicates the Florida Prepaid decision which applied sovereign immunity to states who infringe patents. Later cases interpreted Florida Prepaid to bar actions by defendants seeking to invalidate state…
Later today, the Senate will hold a hearing on how Congress can help prevent the issuance of poor quality patents. I recently testified at a hearing on the STRONGER Patents Act and patent quality was one of the topics discussed. In fact, in my responses to questions for the record from Sen. Tillis, I addressed…
When standard-essential patents (SEPs) are in the news, it’s usually in the context of cellular or wireless networking standards. Maybe you’ve thought about how standards govern other things, ranging from audio-visual encoding standards like MP3 to threads on fire hydrants. But what you probably don’t think about are voting machine standards.
In a decision issued last week, Judge Gilstrap—the “poster boy” for patent trolls’ favorite court, the Eastern District of Texas—has mangled the law on induced infringement, contributory infringement, and willfulness. The ruling in Motiva v. Sony & HTC contradicts case law and the logic of the statute, cites case law for a proposition it explicitly…
It’s become a bit of shibboleth among the folks who want to roll back the patent reforms of the past decade that patent trolls are a myth. Unfortunately, this week one of those mythical trolls is taking a very real swing at a little GNOME.
Patents are a useful tool in innovation policy—but they aren’t the only tool available. If all you ever see are patents (and patent lawyers), your natural reaction is to use patents to solve policy problems. It’s a normal human bias—the law of the instrument states that humans will reach for a familiar tool (i.e., patents)…
In today’s Curver v. Home Expressions decision, the Federal Circuit resolved several outstanding questions regarding design patents. In particular, the Federal Circuit rejected the notion that a design can be claimed, untethered from a specific article of manufacture to which it is applied. It also rejected the notion that the verbal portion of a design…
