Posts Tagged: "Cisco"

Comcast and the High Tech Inventors Alliance (HTIA) filed amicus briefs last week backing a Supreme Court petition brought by Cisco Systems, Inc. last month. The petition asks the Court to consider whether: 1) enhanced damages may be awarded absent a finding of egregious infringement behavior; and 2) whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) may award enhanced damages without first allowing the district court to exercise its discretion to decide that issue. Cisco filed the petition for a writ of certiorari on March 16, following a November 2021 decision of the Federal Circuit that reversed a district court’s denial of SRI International’s motion to reinstate a jury’s willfulness verdict against Cisco. That ruling restored the district court’s award of enhanced damages and affirmed an award of attorney fees for SRI. The CAFC specifically clarified that its reference to language in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Halo Elecs., Inc. v. Pulse Elecs., Inc., 136 S. Ct. 1923, 1934 (2016) on a first appeal in the case was not meant to create a heightened requirement for willful infringement.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today issued a precedential opinion reversing a district court’s denial of SRI International’s motion to reinstate the jury’s willfulness verdict against Cisco Systems, Inc., restoring the district court’s award of enhanced damages, and affirming an award of attorney fees for SRI. The CAFC specifically clarified that its reference to language in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Halo Elecs., Inc. v. Pulse Elecs., Inc., 136 S. Ct. 1923, 1934 (2016) on a first appeal in the case was not meant to create a heightened requirement for willful infringement. Judge Lourie authored the opinion.

Earlier this week, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (the Court) entered what is believed to be one of the highest damages awards ever issued in a patent case, following a 22-day bench trial in Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. In an opinion authored by Senior U.S. District Judge Henry Coke Morgan, Jr., the Court found that Cisco willfully infringed four out of five of Centripetal’s asserted patents and awarded enhanced damages in an amount of $755,808,545 (enhanced by a factor of 2.5X), and prejudgment interest in an amount of $13,717,925, which resulted in a total past damages award amount of $1,903,239,288. In addition, Judge Morgan ordered Cisco to pay Centripetal a running royalty of 10% on the apportioned sales of the accused products and their successors for a period of three years, followed by a second three-year term wherein the running royalty will be 5% on such sales. The royalties would bring the total to a minimum of $2.65 billion and could make it as high as $3.25 billion.

On January 23, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision holding all claims (1-20) of U.S. Patent No. 9,160,713 B2 (the ‘713 patent) unpatentable. The ‘713 patent, owned by Centripetal Networks, Inc. (CN), was challenged in an inter partes review (IPR) by Cisco System, Inc. (Cisco). Of the latest eight final written decisions from the PTAB, all challenged claims were found unpatentable in seven:

The Federal Circuit on October 8 issued a formal mandate in VirnetX, Inc. v. Cisco Systems and Apple, Inc., making its January 15, 2019 Rule 36 judgment against Apple final. The mandate comes after the Court’s denial on October 1 of Apple’s motions to stay and vacate the August 1 decisions affirming-in-part, vacating-in-part, and remanding a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), and separately denying Apple’s August 1 request for rehearing en banc in its appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruling awarding VirnetX nearly $440 million.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the Supreme Court asks for the U.S. Solicitor General’s view on whether patents that claim a method of medically treating a patient automatically satisfy Section 101; a jury gives Qualcomm a win in its ongoing patent battle with Apple; the World Intellectual Property Office announces record-breaking totals for international patent applications and cybersquatting actions; Cisco avoids a nearly $60 million damages award at the Federal Circuit; McDonald’s appeals its loss in the EU over its Big Mac trademark; Tesla files trade secret lawsuits against former employees; Peloton faces a copyright suit from music publishers who are seeking $150 million; and Google gets another billion-dollar-plus fine from antitrust regulators in the EU.

5G, or 5th generation wireless communication, has reached the point of determining which core technologies will be used. Suddenly, decisions about which companies will be picked are upon us. And the stakes could hardly be higher — for the companies and for our national (and American citizens’) security. The two businesses in the ring, Qualcomm and Huawei, each find themselves in a tough fight to dominate the IP-based 5G technology on which countless devices—from automobiles to mobile phones to who-knows-what—will interoperate. The 5G platform will empower the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence writ large and more—a technological advance with tremendous potential as well as tremendous risk exposure to spies, hackers and such. Both companies face hurdles from the U.S. government. One makes sense. The other makes no sense.

According to statistics provided by the USPTO, since the beginning of fiscal year 2012, the Office has received a total of only 1,584 third-party submissions of prior art for consideration by patent examiners. The high water mark occurred in 2016, when the office received a total of 329 third-party prior art submissions. This declined to 266 submissions in 2017 and in fiscal year 2018, the USPTO received a total of only 141 prior art submissions.

The Multiple Proceedings rule has become the essence of uncertainty. What exactly does it mean? §325(d) gives the PTO Director the authority to refuse a petition when “the same or substantially the same prior art or arguments” were previously presented. For IPRs like this one to proceed despite numerous prior rulings in various fora upholding a patent’s validity is a travesty. The facts of this case underscore the mischief that can befall a patent owner under the current practice of the PTAB, enabled by the Federal Circuit… I recently wrote, “[t]he fight goes on to invalidate claims until the patent owner loses and the claims are invalidated.” But that is precisely what the § 325(d) Multiple-Proceedings rule was intended to prevent. And this needs to stop.

As Jaime Siegel, OIN’s Global Director of Licensing, notes, OIN is able to grant free membership to companies joining the consortium thanks to the efforts of eight full-funding member companies which have each funded $20 million to support OIN’s operations through an endowment. These companies include the first six companies to form OIN: Sony, Phillips, IBM, Red Hat, NEC and SUSE; joining those companies are Google and Toyota. OIN’s board consists of representatives from each of these full funding members. Every new member of OIN signs the same licensing agreement as the full-funding members, giving all members in the organization equal standing in terms of the cross-license agreement.

LOT Network markets itself as a non-profit consortium, which offers its members a legal mechanism affording them protection from patent assertion entities (PAEs) and immunizes its members against patent suits from non-operating entities for about 1.2 million worldwide patent assets currently owned by LOT members… The LOT Network conditional license only applies to patents that are in network at the time that a firm joins the consortium. If a business joins LOT after a LOT member sells a patent, previous LOT members are protected by the conditional license whereas the new member still faces the potential of an infringement suit down the road on that patent.

On Monday, August 6th, Santa Clara, CA-based computer networking Arista Networks filed a Form 8-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announcing the firm had entered into an agreement with San Jose, CA-based networking rival Cisco Systems that dismisses all pending litigation between the two firms in both U.S. district courts and at the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). Under the terms of the agreement, Arista will pay Cisco $400 million this month in return for Cisco dropping all patent infringement claims which it has filed against Arista. In addition to Cisco dropping its patent infringement claims, Arista also agreed to drop all antitrust claims which it has filed against its rival.

Congresswoman Lofgren seems quick to forget that she was one of the original co-sponsors of the Innovation Act when it was introduced into the House back in February 2015. Had the Innovation Act passed, it would have required patents challenged in IPR proceedings to be construed in the exact same manner that a district court would have required in a civil action to invalidate the patent. So, it seems Lofgren was for the Phillips standard and eliminating BRI before she was against it.

Between 1882 and 1906, this market dominance reportedly brought Standard Oil a total of $838,783,800 in net income. On an annual basis, that would mean that Standard Oil earned nearly $35 million in net income each year, which equals approximately $969 million in 2017 dollars when adjusted for inflation… To some of the tech super giants of today, $1 billion in profits is nothing more than pocket change… If Standard Oil remains the benchmark for what it means to be a monopoly, which many believe it does, it is difficult to understand why U.S. Antitrust regulators are not at least asking very serious questions about the market dominance of the tech super giants and the associated suppression of smaller, truly innovative enterprises.