The Prior Art

Patent Litigation Weekly: Shutter Closing on Massive Photo-Sharing Patent Suit

FotoMedia is a patent-holding company that claims just about every photo-sharing website you can imagine infringes its three patents. Its lawsuits, covered by TPA last May and June, are notable not just for the audacity of the claims they make, but also because they target dozens of small- and medium-sized software companies that provide various types of photo-sharing services over the Internet.

In previous stories about the FotoMedia suits, TPA detailed the litigation’s effect on San Francisco-based Fotki.com, which has about 25 employees, and the three-man, Texas-based software company FotoTime.

As the new year starts, some of the FotoMedia defendants are breathing a sigh of relief—and the rest may be doing the same soon. That's because reexamination requests filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Yahoo Inc. appear to have knocked out nearly all the patent claims at issue. FotoMedia's lawyers at McKool Smith have reacted to that development by offering to either stay the suits or have them dismissed without prejudice (leaving FotoMedia able refile the claims at a later date.)

Patent Litigation Weekly: So What Do E.D. Texas Jurors Really Think?

This week: The Prior Art returns after its winter blogging break. As Microsoft gets set to scrap software found to infringe a Canadian company's software, The Prior Art discusses the case with three of the eight jurors whose verdict helped put the software giant in this predicament.

As of Monday—thanks to a permanent injunction issued in August by Judge Leonard Davis of the Eastern District of Texas and upheld last month by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals—Microsoft Inc. must stop selling any version of Microsoft Word 2007 or Microsoft Office 2007 that includes a custom XML editor found to infringe a patent held by a small Canadian software company called i4i, Inc.

It’s not every day that such a well-known product has to be modified—or possibly removed from store shelves—because of a patent dispute. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court made getting such an injunction in a patent case extremely difficult with its landmark eBay v. MercExchange ruling in 2006.

Microsoft isn’t giving up the court fight over the patent at issue just yet. On Friday, the company’s legal team, led by Matthew Powers of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, filed a petition with the Federal Circuit asking for a rehearing en banc. Powers didn't return calls for this story. Earlier coverage on i4i's trial win, post-trial action, and Federal Circuit win is available from the AmLaw Litigation Daily.