27
03
2020
IP Watchdog
IPWatchdog
January 22, 2020
The U.S. District court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, overturned a $10.1 million jury verdict on January 17 against Japanese gaming giant Nintendo under the Supreme Court’s Alice test, which the High Court recently declined to clarify amidst confusion. In August of 2017, a Texas jury entered a verdict against Nintendo, finding that the company had infringed upon a patent asserted by Texas-based medical tech firm iLife Technologies Inc. The jury agreed that iLife proved that it was owed $10.1 million in a lump sum royalty for the sales of a series of games for Nintendo’s Wii U console. The jury also found that Nintendo didn’t prove invalidity of the asserted patent. In its analysis overturning the jury verdict, the district court reasoned that “[a]t its core, Claim 1 is directed to the abstract idea of ‘gathering, processing and transmitting…information.’”
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Categories : Patent
27
03
2020
IP Watchdog
Nicholas Hawkins
January 23, 2020
Two things are true about the world of trademarks—it is rarely boring, and something is always on the horizon. The following are some of the significant trademark decisions of 2019, as well as two critical cases to watch as 2020 begins: 1. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Iancu v. Brunetti rejected the Lanham Act’s ban on offensive marks on the grounds that such a ban violates the First Amendment Right of Free Speech. The case involved clothing brand FUCT, which stands for “Friends You Can’t Trust,” and its founder, Erik Brunetti, who sought to register the brand’s name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The USPTO refused to register the name, determining it was immoral and scandalous. Brunetti argued to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) that the mark was not vulgar, and that Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act was unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment. However, the TTAB affirmed the USPTO’s refusal and Brunetti appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC).
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Categories : Patent
24
03
2020
IP Watchdog
Gene Quinn
February 16, 2020
As anyone who follows the United States Supreme Court knows, the Court has historically been extremely fond of taking important cases with cutting edge issues, only to dodge the real issues and address some insignificant procedural or hyper-technical issue. Such disappointment is all too frequent, so Supreme Court watchers are seldom surprised when the Court passes on an opportunity to breathe clarity into otherwise unsettled waters. But what the Supreme Court did in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange LLC, 547 U.S. 388 (2006) was far more disappointing. In eBay, the Supreme Court decided to throw out longstanding and well-established Federal Circuit jurisprudence and offered little or nothing in its place. The result has been an extraordinary shift in the balance of power between patent owners and infringers.
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Categories : Patent
24
03
2020
IP Watchdog
Raymond Millien
February 17, 2020
As an update to my posts from 2017 and 2019, it has now been more than six years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank decision. Still, the IP bar awaits a clear and reliable test to determine when exactly a software (or computer-implemented) claim is patentable versus being simply an abstract idea “free to all men and reserved exclusively to none.” The USPTO’s Section 101 guidelines interpreting Alice—and the accompanying 46 examples—have not cleared the confusion, and Alice continues to distract the USPTO, courts, and practitioners from focusing properly on Sections 102 (novelty) and 103 (obviousness). The net effects still being increased cost, lower patent quality, lower patent portfolio valuations, wasted patent reform lobbying dollars and, in many instances, the denial of patent protection for worthwhile software inventions.
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Comments : Comments Off on Six Years After Alice: 61.8% of U.S. Patents Issued in 2019 Were ‘Software-Related’—up 21.6% from 2018
Categories : Patent
21
03
2020
IP Watchdog
Steve Brachmann
March 19, 2020
On March 13, American semiconductor developer Broadcom Corporation filed a lawsuit in the Central District of California alleging claims of patent infringement against streaming media producer and provider Netflix, Inc. . . .Broadcom is asserting claims from nine U.S. patents and accuses Netflix of directly infringing the patent claims through its Internet video streaming technology and indirectly infringing by inducing end users to infringe through their use of the Netflix software application
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Categories : Patent
