Posts Tagged: "Court"

The PTAB subjects all patent owners to double jeopardy, but the situation is particularly bad for pharmaceutical companies which already have to face a Congressionally-mandated validity review process under the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act, colloquially known as Hatch-Waxman. This law creates a regime by which a generic drugmaker can file an abbreviated new drug application (ANDA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The branded pharmaceutical listed in the Orange Book will be covered by patents but the generic drugmaker can include a Paragraph IV certification in the ANDA, a declaration that the patents covering the Orange Book-listed drug are unenforceable and invalid. When a company like Allergan has to face Hatch-Waxman validity trials in federal district court and serial IPRs at the PTAB, it turns Allergan’s Restasis patents into piñatas taking hit after hit at multiple forums before being finally ripped asunder at some point.

Although patent litigation levels through the first nine months of 2017 have largely remained consistent with patterns from recent years, it does appear that the number of patent suits filed in U.S. district courts has been on a slow decline in recent years. There were a total of 995 patent lawsuits filed in district court during 2017’s third quarter, an 8.4 percent decline when compared to totals from 2016’s third quarter. Year-over-year declines in patent suit filing were also seen in the first and second quarters of 2016 as well. As Lex Machina data scientist Brian Howard notes, 2017 continued a trend in which patent suit filings tend to drop in the first quarter of the year, rise during the second quarter and then fall again during the third quarter. “Historically, that’s a pattern that we’ve seen pretty consistently in the past few years,” Howard said.

On Friday, October 6th, Chicago, IL-based intellectual property owner Ironworks Patents LLC filed a patent infringement case against Cupertino, CA-based consumer tech giant Apple Inc. in the District of Delaware. Ironworks’ complaint alleges that Apple’s sale of various iPhone models infringe upon patents that Ironworks owns which cover programmable alert sounds and related technologies incorporated into Apple’s smartphones.

Finjan asserts four patents in the case and alleges that Bitdefender’s marketing of antivirus, cloud and sandboxing technologies infringes upon the patents-in-suit. The case has been filed in the Northern District of California… Finjan’s suit against Bitdefender alleges that Bitdefender was presented with written notice of the alleged infringement of Finjan’s patents as early as February 2015. In October 2015, Finjan alleged that it discussed the ‘844, ‘154 and ‘494 patents with Bitdefender and how those patents read on technology practiced by Bitdefender. Despite numerous in-person and telephone meetings, Finjan alleges that that Bitdefender has continued to engage in willful and deliberate infringement of Finjan’s IP.

Business method patents are still being granted after Alice, but are being granted at lower rates than before, and some assignees are better at obtaining them than others. The top assignees in the business methods art units have a wide range of allowance rates, from Oracle at 83.3% to Siemens at 35.3%, resulting in a difference of 48 percentage points. Even among the most successful assignees, only three have allowance rates of over 50%.