Posts Tagged: "jury instructions"

On November 3, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued an order in In re: Ivantis, Inc. denying a petition for a writ of mandamus filed by Ivantis. The petition asked the CAFC to vacate an order of United States District Court for the Central District of California “granting an adverse-inference instruction and to bar the district court from issuing any adverse-inference instruction or alternatively to require the district court to defer consideration of any adverse-inference instruction until the end of trial.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed a decision of the District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia finding that GMS Mine Repair and Maintenance, Inc. (GMS) infringed Hafco Foundry and Machine Company, Inc.’s (Hafco) design patent, U.S. Design Patent No. D681,684 (the ’684 patent), directed to a rock dust blower for distributing rock dust in areas such as coal mines.  The CAFC also affirmed the district court’s denial of GMS’ request for a new trial due to errors in the jury instructions. Judge Newman concurred with the majority’s decision but wrote separately to note that she would have resolved the matter of damages by accepting Hafco’s proposed remitter of $110,000, which was the total of Hafco’s lost profits.

This appeal revolves around the jury verdict form. The form included a stop instruction, which told the jury not to consider invalidity defenses unless first finding infringement. Globus failed to object to the instruction prior to the jury’s deliberations. Resubmission to the jury was not an error.

This case concerns ongoing disputes between Power Integrations and Fairchild Semiconductors. The companies sued each other in Delaware, each asserting infringement of multiple patents by the other. At issue were power supply controller chips used ubiquitously in modern electronics, the patents related to those chips, and how power is supplied and regulated from the upstream source to the downstream electronic device… Induced infringement requires successful communication between the alleged inducer and the third-party infringer; it is not sufficient in itself that others directly infringed the asserted claims.

According to Limelight, the district court’s construction of “tagging” was limited to using a “pointer” or “hook” to prepend or insert a virtual server hostname into a URL. The Court rejected “prepending” as a claim limitation because even though the ‘703 patent described prepending as a preference, there was no indication from the claims or prosecution history that tagging was limited to this preferred embodiment. The Court found no error in the jury instructions and held that Limelight was bound to the stipulated construction of “tagging” originally read to the jury.