The Prior Art

Two big IP verdicts slip away from plaintiffs

Two historic verdicts, one copyright and one patent, were overturned this week.

• The recording industry's sole jury win in a music downloading case was overturned on appeal Wednesday. The problem was Jury Instruction No. 15, which told the jury the record companies don't have to prove any copyrighted files were actually transferred. Defendant Jammie Thomas was found liable and ordered to pay $222,000. But a federal judge in Duluth, Minnesota said that instruction was wrong, and Thomas will get a new trial. [Wired]

• Alcatel-Lucent's $1.5 billion jury verdict against Microsoft, for infringing patents on mp3 technology, was overturned  by the Federal Circuit. (That award had already been overturned by a district court judge; and the appeals court upheld that judge's decision.) If the Alcatel-Lucent award had been reinstated, it would have been the largest patent infringement verdict ever. [AP] [MarketWatch]

The biggest patent verdict instead remains Polaroid's lawsuit against Kodak's line of instant cameras; the suit wiped out Kodak's instant camera business by the late 1980's and awarded $910 million to Polaroid in 1991.

Alcatel-Lucent was represented by Kirkland & Ellis; Microsoft by Fish & Richardson.

 

Jones Day vs. the Internet

After more than a year on the IP beat, I had come to believe that we-own-the-Internet lawsuits were mainly the terrain of certain patent owners. But this month we saw the trademark owners step up, in the form of a major law firm protecting its intellectual property with a "permission to link" lawsuit.

Jones Day, a megafirm with 2,100+ attorneys, has sued a small real estate news service for trademark infringement, dilution, and some related claims. The firm claims that by writing two stories about Jones Day associates who bought real estate, and linking to their firm bios, Blockshopper.com ignored the law firm's trademark rights.

Last week, Public Citizen and EFF filed an amicus brief arguing that Internet hyperlinks do not a trademark infringement claim make.

Sealed documents in patent lawsuits: how much is too much?

Recently my fellow patent bloggers at PA Tracer wrote about the process of filing under seal in the Eastern District of Texas. They asked myself and ED Tex blogger Michael Smith to respond. I sent Kyle Fleming some of my own thoughts on sealed records which he posted earlier this week. I am cross-posting my response below.

Michael Smith, who writes the ED Tex Weblog, shared some more venue-specific thoughts about the E.D. Texas rules on sealing records. Also see R. David Donoghue, who writes the Chicago IP Litigation Blog; he argues that at least in the Northern District of Illinois, "judges largely get it right."

Scott Harris patents alive and kicking; lawyer claims he invented GPS features

Scott Harris is in a good mood. And why not? He's free of the confinements of big-firm lifestyle, and has emerged from the Fish litigation with his patents. (The firm had tried to assert control over those patents, arguing that it, and not Harris, owned the ideas cooked up while Harris worked at Fish.)

Harris and Memory Control Enterprises filed suit against eight GPS manufacturers last week, including Sony and Magellan Navigation, claiming their products infringe two Harris patents, 6,892,136 and 6,604,047, both named "Non real time traffic system for a navigator." The patents cover GPS systems that do clever things like calculate different routes based on likely driving times, taking traffic into account. The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago). [Complaint, PDF]

The two patents are quite similar; Harris filed the earlier one in 2001.

"When I thought of this and tried to put it into practice, it was pure science fiction," said Harris. Now, he says "a lot of companies are infringing my patent."

Neat trick: Facebook dodges Spangenberg's search patent

PA Advisors, LLC is an arm of Erich Spangenberg's patent-holding empire. Its job is to assert U.S. Patent No. 6,199,067, which claims the use of user profiles in Internet search; it was used to sue Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and several other smaller players in November 2007. [full PA Advisors docket]

On Friday, Law360 reported that the suit was dismissed against Facebook; and remarkably, a Facebook spokesman said that no payment at all was made to Spangenberg. That's pretty unusual in a case brought by a patent-holding company.

If a case isn't going well, it's still typical for a plaintiff to get at least a small payment. That payment might not even cover the plaintiff's legal costs, so it's effectively a defense win; but it allows the plaintiff to save face. But not here: “After meeting with Facebook and learning more about our technology, we appreciate that PA Advisors decided to dismiss their claims without any payment or other agreement,” said the Facebook spokesman.

Lawyers & Patents: Tempting Terrain

 

"Tempting Terrain," a story about three lawyer/inventors who have used their patents to unleash industry-wide lawsuits, has been published on Law.com and IPLB.com.

In the course of reporting this story I discovered several other lawyers with patents who did not make it into the story for space reasons. I'll be reporting out those stories, time permitting, here on the blog.

Update: To clarify, I am looking only at lawyers that have enforced their patents in court, and only on their own behalf.