Yesterday afternoon, the Federal Circuit overturned the Eastern District of Texas’s test for venue. Even after TC Heartland, patent trolls were trying to keep defendants in the Eastern District of Texas. And in the first order issued by Judge Gilstrap, in a case called Raytheon v. Cray, it seemed like he was going to cooperate.…
Blog Posts
IPR Successes: Trolls and Tolls
by Josh Landau • • 2 Comments
September marks the five-year anniversary of inter partes review (IPR), and Patent Progress is highlighting how successful the system has been at achieving its stated goals of increasing patent quality by providing a second look at invalid patents and decreasing costs by providing an efficient alternative to litigation. Last week, I showed that, in those 5…
Inter Partes Review: Five Years, Over $2 Billion Saved
by Josh Landau • • 3 Comments
This Saturday, September 15, 2017, marks the five-year anniversary of the first filing of an inter partes review. We’ve seen nearly 7,000 post-grant reviews filed since then, a Supreme Court case dealing with IPRs, and there are a pair of IPR Supreme Court cases up this term. [Oil States] [SAS] Over the next few weeks,…
Why Pay For Delay When You Can Pay For Immunity
by Josh Landau • • 3 Comments
What do Seymour Cray’s high-performance computing research company SRC Labs and drug manufacturer Allergan have in common? Both SRC Labs and Allergan sold patents to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, then licensed them back from the tribe, in order to use tribal sovereign immunity to prevent challenges to their patents as invalid.
Now The ITC Is Banning Products Over Invalid Patents
by Josh Landau • • 4 Comments
The International Trade Commission (ITC) is supposed to protect U.S. industries from unfair foreign competition. They’re supposed to consider the interests of the U.S. public. But recently, it seems more like the ITC is interested in the ITC’s own power, not the interests of U.S. industry or the public. Setting aside problems with their procedures…
Andrei Iancu Nominated For PTO Director
by Josh Landau • • 2 Comments
On Friday, the Trump Administration nominated Andrei Iancu to be the next Director of the USPTO. Mr. Iancu has extensive experience in patent litigation. This includes work on behalf of both patent owners, representing TiVo against a variety of companies, as well as defendants, including representing B/E Aerospace in litigation over aircraft toilet patents. He…
Multiple Petitions? More Like Multiplicative Claiming And Assertion
by Josh Landau • • 1 Comment
One of the criticisms frequently leveled against inter partes reviews (IPRs) is that people file multiple IPRs; they file two, three, four IPR petitions in order to harass a patent owner. Complaints notwithstanding, the data shows just how infrequent a practice this is. The data also shows that the blame for the occasions when this…
It’s The Claim Language—Except When It Isn’t
by Josh Landau • • 1 Comment
Last week, the Federal Circuit handed down a decision in Visual Memory v. NVIDIA, deciding that the Visual Memory1 cache patents are patent-eligible under § 101. Unfortunately, in doing so the Federal Circuit makes the same mistake they’ve made a few times now—they’ve looked at the specification, not the claims, in order to justify finding…
On Tacos
by Josh Landau • • 0 Comments
The taco. Whether you like ground beef with cheese and lettuce or chorizo with cilantro and onion, I’d be willing to bet that you probably like some kind of taco. And (fortunately, or maybe unfortunately for our waistlines) no one owns a patent on the taco. Now, taco plates? That’s another story. D574187 D574,187 is…
It’s The End Of The Podcast Patent And We Know It
by Josh Landau • • 2 Comments
In eagerly awaited news, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) determination that Personal Audio’s U.S. Pat. No. 8,112,504 is invalid based on an inter partes review petition from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). That’s right. The podcast patent is dead. And I feel fine. Stand(ing) Setting aside the merits of…