Posts Tagged: "Newegg"

It seems that this article caught the attention of Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer, Lee Cheng, who proceeded to contact me through LinkedIn and berate me in bizarre fashion throughout the day yesterday… Cheng first reached out to me with a simple message: “You are hilarious.” I responded: “Thanks for reading IPWatchdog.com. I hope you learn something.” And then I got a real look into the top legal mind of Newegg. The only word I can use to describe Cheng, at least based on this exchange, is schizophrenic. He went from telling me I was “a smart guy ” that he wanted to meet to someone who was nothing more than an incompetent patsy on the patent troll payroll. This occurred over the span of only several e-mails.

Everyone who has objectively looked at the case knows that the Federal Circuit made a terrible mistake, but not that won’t be corrected and a serial patent infringer that has made a business practice of ignoring patent rights gets to use the Soverain technology for free. And just when you think things couldn’t get more strange, Newegg makes a bizarre comment with misogynistic undertones. “The witch is dead, hurray,” said Lee Cheng, Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that Cheng is calling Wolanyk a witch. Of course he will denied such a charge and he and his supporters will proclaim their innocence. But this is no different than liberals working “weight” into every comment or tweet they make about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. This type of not so subtle dig is what those familiar with Newegg have come to expect. It is this juvenile, over the top, holier-than-thou attitude that Newegg personifies.

Open Market grew rapidly, went public, made acquisitions, and outlived about 15 of its competitors, but was hit hard by the bursting of Internet Bubble 1.0 in 2000. The eCommerce software part of Open Market’s business, called “Transact”, and the related patents were acquired in 2003 by Soverain Software, which still develops and supports Transact and its customers today. Soverain also filed a number of patent lawsuits, and settled or won all of them, up until this year. On September 4, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which is the appeals court responsible for patent cases, confirmed its January opinion that certain claims of the ‘314 patent (and some others) were invalid as obvious. Soverain has filed a petition for the case to be heard by the Supreme Court, and I hope it is accepted, because I think the CAFC got it really wrong.

Earlier today the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued it latest decision in Soverain Software LLC v. Newegg, Inc. (Fed. Cir., September 4, 2013). This latest decision was necessitated by the limited grant of rehearing ordered on June 13, 2013. The rehearing was granted for the purpose of clarifying the status of claims 34 and 35 of Patent No. 5,715,314. Before jumping into the substance of this case, the first thing I noticed was that Seth Waxman of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr was listed as the lead attorney for Soverain Software in both the petition for rehearing and the ensuing briefs. It is hard to imagine that Soverain has brought in Seth Waxman at this late stage if they are not contemplating an appeal to the Supreme Court.