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Apple Inc. pushed back Tuesday against Ericsson Inc.'s request for an expedited trial in their heated dispute over the licensing of 41 standard-essential patents Ericsson is asserting against Apple, telling a Texas federal court it should reject Ericsson s unprecedented maneuver and toss the case.

May 6, 2015

Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP announced Wednesday it has bolstered its white collar and cybersecurity practices in Los Angeles by snagging a former partner at McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP with experience as a federal prosecutor of copyright infringement, health care fraud, theft of trade secrets and cyber attacks.

May 6, 2015

The Federal Circuit on Wednesday affirmed that an Eon Corp. IP Holdings LLC interactive TV patent asserted against AT s post-argument order in Microsoft Corp. v. Proxyconn Inc. suggests that the court is seriously considering overturning Idle Free. If the court holds that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s application of its regulation governing motions to amend is fatally overbroad, dozens of inter partes review decisions face reversal and remand to the PTAB for consideration of rejected claim amendments, says Robert Barnes o. (continued)

A question that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Teva v. Sandoz and the case law to date have not explicitly addressed is whether a district court’s reliance on “extrinsic” dictionaries for claim construction will be treated as a type of “fact” determination entitled to deference, says John Battaglia of Fisch Sigler LLP.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board's recent rehearing decision granting an opposed motion to amend in Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. v. 5th Market Inc. provides useful guidance to patent owners seeking to amend their claims to address non-prior art based rejections, says George Dolina of Birch Stewart Kolasch & Birch LLP.

With more than 5,000 current registrants, the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Program, which permits companies to transfer EU citizen data to the U.S. only if those companies voluntarily certify that they comply with certain data protection standards, is hugely important to companies on both sides of the Atlantic. But the program is in jeopardy, say Devika Kornbacher and Jeffrey Han of Vinson & Elkins LLP.

Recent decisions emphasize that the best way to survive an indefiniteness challenge is to use the language of the claims in the specification, provide sufficient examples, and avoid subjective language and ambiguities during prosecution, say attorneys with Dentons.

By looking at long-term technology trends and likely future applications, a portfolio manager can provide support in the patent application at the time of drafting to cover future commercial implementations of the idea, some of which may seem distant at the time of filing, says Michael Moore, intellectual property and deputy general counsel at Rambus Inc.

What percentage of your company’s revenue is attributable to its brand protection program? Did your program improve margins? Did it increase market share? If the answer to any of these is “no” — or worse, “I don’t know” — it may be time to reconsider your program’s role within your organization and how you measure its success, say David Cooper and Andrew Muir of Sideman & Bancroft LLP.

By utilizing inter partes review proceedings alongside district court litigations, patent assignors can potentially circumvent the doctrine of assignor estoppel through a stay of the corresponding litigation, say Jeremiah Frueauf and Sana Hussain of Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox PLLC.

A Pennsylvania federal court s recent decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Cephalon Inc. and the Cardinal Health Inc. settlement indicate that the FTC now views its role as not only to prevent repeat antitrust violations through injunctive relief, but to more aggressively complement the U.S. Department of Justice and private plaintiffs for recovery of what it deems ill-gotten gains of anti-competitive behavior, say Donald Lake a. (continued)

With Kienitz v. Sconnie Nation LLC, the U.S. Supreme Court has once again passed on an opportunity to address the appropriate framework for evaluating fair use of a copyrighted work. The key dispute highlighted in Kienitz is the difference in the approach taken by the Second and Ninth Circuits that focuses on the degree to which a work is “transformative” and the Seventh Circuit s more economically focused approach, say Andrea Weis. (continued)