Posts Tagged: "Patent Assertion"

Apple’s Declaratory Judgment Backfires, Turns Into $145.1M Damages Verdict Wi-LAN

On August 1st, a jury verdict entered in the Southern District of California awarded $145.1 million in reasonable royalty damages to Canadian IP licensing firm Wi-LAN in a patent infringement case against Cupertino, CA-based consumer device giant Apple Inc. The jury determined that Apple infringed upon claims of two patents owned by Wi-LAN.

A Surreal Endeavor: Asserting Patent Rights in the U.S.

Asserting patent rights is a surreal endeavor these days. While the statistics on survival at the PTAB are improving, with the percentage of initiated proceedings declining and some patents seeing their claims affirmed, the cost and time necessary for a patentee to claw their way back to the district court—i.e., back to Square One—proves too much for many patentees. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) to fight at the PTAB simply to confirm issued patent claims is pushing many patentees out of the enforcement market. With such oppressive legal hurdles and costs, what good is a patent? For many, it cannot be enforced?

Open Prosecution as a Strategy to Counter IPRs Filed by Defendants

One of the most valuable benefits of Open Prosecution is when a patentee is forced to enforce a patent. If the patentee filed for a Continuation, it could file for an additional patent with new Claims but the same Priority Date as the original patent, and add it to the lawsuit. And, of course, before that second patent is issued, the patentee files for yet another Continuation. The plaintiff in a patent infringement lawsuit can use an Open Prosecution model to continue to introduce new patents as a counter-strategy to the IPRs filed by the defendant. More than a few patent infringement lawsuits ended in favorable settlements once the defendant realized it had a formidable opponents with additional patents up its prosecution sleeve.