May 31, 2012 - French company Cie. de Saint-Gobain SA, Europe's largest supplier of building materials, will have to pay Siemens Medical Solutions USA $44.9 million (and possibly more) for patent infringement following a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Pricegrabber.com Pays Royalty for Past and Future Use of Data Distribution Technologies’ Patent
Suffern, N.Y. – May 31, 2012 − General Patent Corporation (GPC), a leading patent licensing and enforcement company, announced today on behalf of its subsidiary, Data Distribution Technologies LLC (DDT), that it settled a patent infringement lawsuit with Pricegrabber.com, Inc. of Los Angeles, Calif. Under the settlement agreement, Pricegrabber.com paid DDT’s standard 1% royalty on its past and future sales.
May 29, 2012 - Hewlett Packard Corp. (HP) announced that it has settled its patent litigation with Multilaser Industrial Ltd., a Brazil-based company.
May 25, 2012 - Huawei Technologies filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) against InterDigital, a U.S.-based non-practicing entity that Huawei says is trying to force the Chinese communications equipment company into a "discriminatory, unfair and exploitative" license under eight 3G standard essential patents.
Last year, as everyone familiar with the term "patent auction" is aware, a consortium of Big Tech's heavy hitters (well, except Google) and calling itself Rockstar Bidco paid $4.5 billion for the patent portfolio of Nortel Networks. Where are they now?
Rockstar is still around, but now calling itself the Rockstar Consortium. The company has control of 4,000 of the 6,000 patents and patent applications purchased in the Nortel auction.
May 24, 2012 - Judge Lucy Koh had ordered the CEOs of Apple and Samsung to meet for settlement talks on May 21 in an effort to avoid a large and complicated trial, but the settlement talks failed, according to a Samsung official interviewed by The Korea Times.
May 24, 2012 - Despite the fact that the jury was reportedly mired in technical details of the Oracle v. Google patent infringement lawsuit on May 22, just one day later the jurors returned a verdict that two Oracle patents were not infringed by Google.
May 22, 2012 - Nearly two years after Kelora Systems LLC filed a patent infringement suit against several e-commerce giants, a federal judge decided that the patent wasn't infringed and that the defendants may recover their legal fees from the plaintiff.
May 15, 2012 - Lodsys LLC, the company known for its patent litigation against app developers for the iPhone, iPad and Android operating systems, filed six more lawsuits this month. Five of the defendants are adult entertainment companies, including Playboy Enterprises Inc.
Jury trials, statistically speaking, are usually a good thing for patent owners. But as patent litigation becomes ever more complex, and the technology underlying the patents ever more mind-boggling, what happens if the case in question goes right over the jurors' heads?
As the bickering continues between Apple and Samsung in their supersized patent, trademark and trade dress litigation, so does Judge Lucy Koh's chastisement of both parties.
Despite both parties' scaling down their lawsuits considerably as per the judge's request, Judge Koh said on Thursday, May 10, that the lawsuits should be narrowed even more.
May 14, 2012 - In a dramatic turn of events - all of which have unfolded in the space of a week - Yahoo's CEO Scott Thompson is stepping down amid controversy over an imaginary computer science degree and reports that he has thyroid cancer. His interim replacement CEO is Ross Levinsohn. The news is big, and raises the question of how it will affect Yahoo's patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.
Alexander Poltorak commented on the spate of patent lawsuits recently filed by Nokia in a Reuters article that was also published in the Chicago Tribune, The Guardian UK, and Yahoo! News, among other publications.
May 10, 2012 - In response to Judge Lucy Koh's warning last week about trimming their claims to a manageable level (details of which are in our blog entry "Take It Down a Notch"), both Apple and Samsung filed amended cases on Monday, May 7.
The CEOs of both companies are still scheduled to meet on May 21 and attempt to negotiate an out of court settlement.
May 10, 2012 - In response to Judge Lucy Koh's warning last week about trimming their claims to a manageable level (details of which are in our blog entry "Take It Down a Notch"), both Apple and Samsung filed amended cases on Monday, May 7.
The CEOs of both companies are still scheduled to meet on May 21 and attempt to negotiate an out of court settlement.
This week, we finally see the conclusion of a trademark infringement lawsuit that began nine years ago. That's enough litigation to drive anyone to drink, so it's appropriate that the two parties involved were the Maker's Mark bourbon distillery and the maker of Casa Cuervo tequila.
This blog has followed the lawsuit for the past couple of years (see our most recent entry on the subject, In Defense of Good Taste).
Giesecke & Devrient Licenses Leighton Technologies’ "Contactless Cards” Patents
May 7, 2012 - Though much more remains to be decided in the much-anticipated patent lawsuit between Oracle and Google, the jury delivered a partial verdict that gave each side something to cautiously celebrate.
The jury found that Google did infringe Oracle's copyrights for Java APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which are programming tools), and that the Google Android operating system infringes nine lines of code.
May 7, 2012 - Eastman Kodak Co.'s patent infringement lawsuit against Shutterfly Inc. and Tiny Prints Inc., a printer of personalized cards, is currently on hold because of Kodak's Chapter 11 bankruptcy. However, Kodak has filed a motion in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to modify the automatic stay on the lawsuit and allow it to proceed.
Well, that's one way to curb the patent wars a bit: Judge Lucy Koh ordered Apple and Samsung to reduce the number of claims in their patent litigation against each other. Between the two companies, they have sixteen patents, six trademarks, five "trade dress" claims and an antitrust case, all of which disputes are spread over 37 products.
And that's after both companies already scaled their claims down a bit.
May 3, 2012 - Nokia filed patent suits against HTC with the U.S. International Trade Commission, and against HTC, Research in Motion Ltd. and Viewsonic Corp. in the U.S. and Germany. The lawsuits cover a total of 45 patents Nokia claims are infringed.
May 1, 2012 - Microsoft has settled the patent infringement lawsuit it filed against Barnes and Noble last year, and the two companies have formed a new, as-yet-unnamed Barnes & Noble subsidiary currently referred to as "Newco."