Federal Circuit Decides On New Standards For Willfulness Waiver of A/C Privilege and WP Immunity

In re Seagate The Federal Circuit dropped a bomb today with this unanimous decision. Here’s the quick and dirty: 1) To prove willfulness, patentees now must show “objective recklessness. The Federal Circuit abandoned any affirmative duty of care on alleged infringers in relation to willfulness. 2) Waiver of the attorney-client privilege when asserting an opinion

Reform Debate Extends to Claim Construction

Claim construction follows a well trodden path through a patent’s prosecution history, specification, and, most importantly, the language of the claims. Who knew that the process could also implicate the ongoing debate over the fairness and stability of the current patent regime? Consider, for example, a recent dissent authored by Federal Circuit Senior Judge Plager

CAFC Affirms Summary Judgment Decision in D. Del. Business-Intelligence Software Case

On Monday, the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision of former Delaware district judge Kent A. Jordan that granted summary judgment of noninfringment and invalidity. After construing the claims of Plaintiff Microstrategy’s three software patents, the district court found that Business Objects did not infringe one and that the other two were invalid for indefiniteness and

O is for Obvious… The Federal Circuit Affirms the D. Del. Under the New(?) KSR Obviousness Standard

In its first decision on obviousness since the Supreme Court handed down the KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex, Inc. decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed a District Court of Delaware decision finding Leapfrog’s patent obvious in light of the prior art. Leapfrog Enterprises, Inc. v. Fisher-Price, Inc. and Mattel, Inc. (Fed. Cir. May 9, 2007).

Decision From D. Del. Affirmed By Federal Circuit

Syngenta brought a suit in the District of Delaware alleging that Monsanto infringed three of its patents relating to genetically-modified corn. The district court held two of the patents not infringed as a matter of law. As to the third patent, a jury found the asserted claims infringed but invalid as obvious and lacking an

Link Between the Blackberry and Vonage Cases?

A reader posted an interesting comment on Patently-O today about the Federal Circuit’s recent grant of an “emergency stay” of the permanent injunction that issued in the Vonage-Verizon litigation: After all the bad press over refusing the stay in the Blackberry case and letting the Virginia judge force a greater than half billion dollar settlement

Federal Circuit: Curing Inequitable Conduct by Misrepresentation?

What would you do if you discovered that in prosecuting a patent application, your client failed to disclose a relevant piece of prior art during an earlier prosecution of a related application? One way to avoid the potential inequitable conduct is to fully disclose the art in the current application. But while making this disclosure,

Federal Circuit Refuses to Hear D. Del. Appeal

In a tersely worded order, the Federal Circuit has declined to entertain an interlocutory appeal from a decision of then-Delaware district judge Kent A. Jordan. The case began when pharmaceutical giant Amgen Inc. filed suit against Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc., seeking a declaratory judgment of noninfringement and invalidity. Faced with a motion to dismiss for lack

Federal Circuit Rejects Delaware Judge’s Non-Enablement Finding

In a decision handed down today, the Federal Circuit has given Impax Laboratories another chance to prove to a Delaware judge that its ANDA application is not hampered by Aventis Pharmaceuticals’s patent. The appellate court agreed that Impax had failed to prove inequitable conduct at trial, but found that one of two pieces of prior