Periodically, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is asked when someone other than the patent owner of record may bring a patent infringement suit. The answer: the patentee (person that the patent issued to) and successors in title to the patentee. If the analysis stopped there, you could sue only if you [...]
The US Supreme Court issued an opinion today in Medimmune, Inc. v. Genetech, Inc., et al. that held (8 to 1) that, under the facts of that case,? a licensee was not required terminate its existing license or be in breach prior to seeking a declaratory judgment that the licensed patent was invalid, unenforceable, or not [...]
Bloomberg.com has an interesting article about patent damages for 2006, asserting that the $1Billion awards level was almost triple the level in 2005. There are some interesting quotes and statistics. One thing I did not like about the article was the assertion that damages were this high because of increased efforts to “fend off competition” [...]
A new website was officially launched today: FedCirc.Us. This is what the site says about its purpose: “FedCirc.us is a portal of patent caselaw information built on a foundation of timely, accurate and considerate reviews of appellate level court decisions.? Content is organized to provide quick updates on the latest developments in the law and [...]
PriceWaterhouseCoopers has made a damages study available – a summary that asserts that damage awards are increasing and trial tactics are changing. You may use this link to sign up to receive the short 32 page brief study. I found this study by reviewing this post. My comments to the post are reproduced below. ========== [...]
I am certainly not a financial advisor and I am not recommending that you invest in this product. I am writing about something that is new to me, and therefore I believe it may be new to some of you. (When I started working at Townsend and Townsend as a young associate almost 20 years [...]
Today was a busy day for many bloggers, commenting that Microsoft had applied for patents on RSS or that Microsoft was going to get “the” patent on web feeds! As? we’ll see, this is? not? the case at all so we can all rest easy. Here are the two applications so you can read along yourself and see [...]