Posts Tagged: "Hynix Semiconductor"

USPTO Director Lee sued for declaring federal holiday, allowing IPR filing after statutory deadline

It was only going to be a matter of time before Director Lee declaring a federal holiday without any statutory authority came back to haunt the USPTO. Here the defendants were served with the complaint on December 24, 2014, which means any IPR had to be filed on or before Thursday, December 24, 2015. The defendants filed their IPR petitions on Monday, December 28, 2015. The patent owner argues in a recently filed federal complaint that the IPR petitions would be considered untimely but for Director Lee declaring December 22-24, 2015, federal holidays due to the catastrophic failure of the USPTO’s electronic filing systems.

DOJ: Patent Licenses Should Discharge in Bankruptcy

The dispute at issue here regarding Qimonda arose when the company went bankrupt and seven licensees invoked the protection of § 365(n) to retain patent rights. This became an issue because there is no similar provision on German law, thus there is an attempt to nullify the patent licenses. This would force the seven licensees to open fresh negotiations or face expensive patent infringement litigation which they could not hope to prevail in since they are almost certainly infringing.

Intellectual Ventures Becomes Patent Troll Public Enemy #1

Intellectual Ventures unleashed three separate patent infringement litigations in the U.S. District Court of Delaware against companies in the software security; dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and Flash memory; and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) industries. While I do not begrudge any patent owner their day in court to seek redress for infringement, we really should at least notice the obvious hypocrisy of Intellectual Ventures, who for years said they were only amassing a defensive portfolio and had no interest in becoming what we all knew they could become; namely that most massive patent troll on the planet.