March Madness is over, with the Big Ten not taking home a championship. (A sad day for Michigan fans like me.) But that’s okay—in April, the Big Ten Network has plenty to keep busy with. Baseball, softball, tennis, track and field, rowing… And patent lawsuits. At-Home Broadcasting About a decade ago, the Big Ten created…
Tag Archive for Abusive Patent Litigation
Why Is The ITC Instituting Investigations On Expiring Patents?
by Josh Landau • • 1 Comment
Yesterday, the ITC published the Federal Register notice of the initial determination of an ITC administrative law judge (ALJ). The ALJ determined that the investigation, instituted in January based on a complaint filed last year, shouldn’t go further forward and terminated the case for good cause. I’m going to totally set aside the merits of…
Courts Will Swipe Left On Tinder’s Suit Against Bumble
by Josh Landau • • 1 Comment
Tinder swiped right on a lawsuit against Bumble last week, but their lawsuit has more than just surface flaws. Tinder’s lawsuit alleges a number of forms of intellectual property violations—but basically, it comes down to claiming that they own the idea and the design of swiping, especially for a dating app. A Brief History Of…
Tribal Immunity May Not Be Wonder Drug For Allergan
by Josh Landau •
This article was originally published on Law360 and is reprinted here. You’ve probably already heard the story. Allergan PLC owns patents related to relieving dry eyes. These patents allegedly read on their drug Restasis. They expired in 2014, leading to a group of generic manufacturers getting ready to enter the market with generic versions of the drug. In…
Big Tech vs. Big Pharma: An Article Filled With Big Errors
by Josh Landau •
On Monday, the Financial Times published an article by Rana Foroohar. While there are a lot of flaws in the article, one particularly pernicious myth shows up—the myth that patent trolls aren’t really a problem. Purporting to look at patent reform as a battle between the tech industry and pharmaceutical manufacturers, the FT article gives…
IPR Successes: Realtors Association Defends Its Members Using IPR
by Josh Landau •
When you buy a house, it’s nice to know where the local schools are, where the closest park is, where a nearby grocery is. So realtors commonly embed tools on their websites to show you a map of these “points of interest” in the area around a house for sale. Unsurprisingly, using technology leads to…
All My Excess (Venue) Leaving Texas
by Josh Landau •
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.…
Inter Partes Review: Five Years, Over $2 Billion Saved
by Josh Landau •
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,…
Multiple Petitions? More Like Multiplicative Claiming And Assertion
by Josh Landau •
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…
The Cost Of Bad Patents: It’s Not Just The Lawsuit
by Josh Landau •
The cost of bad patents is not just the cost of lawsuits. This may seem obvious, but apparently it isn’t. I’ve recently noticed a trend from the anti-reform lobby: someone testifies in front of Congress about patent reform, they complain that “they’ve only been sued once or twice, why are they being asked to…