Posts Tagged: "nonprecedential"

Federal Circuit Affirms $140M Reasonable Royalty for Sprint in Nonprecedential Decision

The Federal Circuit upheld the district court’s damages award of approximately $140 million for Sprint after Time Warner was found to infringe claims of five patents covering technologies related to methods for linking circuit-switched and packet-switched networks within a telecommunications system. Despite the nonprecedential designation, Circuit Judge Haldane Mayer issued a dissenting opinion reflecting his views that the damages award should be vacated and the asserted patent claims found invalid for failing the written description requirement… The Federal Circuit majority also disagreed with Time Warner that the references to the 25 percent rule of thumb in the 2007 Vonage verdict made it inadmissible as evidence to the jury in district court.

CAFC Affirms PTAB Win for Patent Owner in Nonprecedential Decision, Chief Prost Dissents

The Federal Circuit recently issued a nonprecedential opinion in Amazon.com, Inc. v. ZitoVault, LLC, affirming a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that e-commerce giant Amazon failed to prove a patent owned by security solutions provider ZitoVault was unpatentable. The Federal Circuit majority of Circuit Judges Kara Stoll and Kathleen O’Malley disagreed with Amazon’s that the PTAB erred in its claim construction. Dissenting, Chief Judge Sharon Prost wrote that she believed the PTAB’s analysis of a specific claim term was flawed, and she would have vacated the PTAB decision and remanded the case for further consideration. The patent-at-issue was ZitoVault’s U.S. Patent No. 6484257, titled System and Method for Maintaining N Number of Simultaneous Cryptographic Sessions Using a Distributed Computing Environment. Issued in November 2002, it claims a software architecture for conducting a plurality of cryptographic sessions over a distributed computing environment.

The Increasingly Powerful PTAB: Underutilized Precedential Designations Undermines Efficiency and Consistency

The PTO has increased the number of Board decisions as being precedential (so as to serve as a binding authority) by 36% within the last two years. With respect to the increase in precedential decisions: while a 36% increase is substantial, that translates into only an additional 10 precedential decisions – 2 ex parte appeals and 8 IPRs. The current total number of precedential decisions is 38, broken down into 27 ex parte appeals, 2 interferences, 8 IPRs and 1 CBM. Compare these numbers to the number of ex parte appeals and AIA petitions received in 2017 alone (10165 ex parte appeals, 1853 IPR petitions, 54 CBM petitions, and 40 post-grant review petitions).

Light on analysis, heavy on conclusion, no claim construction, CAFC rules claims ineligible

How patent claims can be invalidated without a proper and thorough claim construction is baffling. It flies in the face of everything patent law stands for and does nothing but encourage patent examiners, PTAB judges and district courts to do a facial check based on a gut feeling, nothing more… That type of subjective, half-baked analysis is antithetical to the patent process and the Federal Circuit should be ashamed for engaging in such a review. The only way to competently determine what a claim is directed to and whether the claim adds significantly more, whatever that means, is to do a proper, thorough and competent claim construction, period. Seriously, if the Court is going to publish a decision like this that is heavy on conclusions, non-existent on analysis, and almost certainly drafted by an intern or Staff Attorney, then why even make it a non-precedential opinion?