The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision on Friday vacating-in-part a district court decision that granted SonicWall, Inc. summary judgment of invalidity based on a collateral estoppel decision that the CAFC had since vacated. Judge Bryson concurred in part and dissented in part, disagreeing with the majority’s analysis affirming the district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement as to the claims of certain patents.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential opinion on Monday that reversed and vacated in part a previous lower court ruling in a patent case related to fuel tank sensors. In 2020, SSI Technologies filed a lawsuit against Dongguan Zhengyang Electronic Mechanical LTD (DZEM), alleging infringement of two patents that covered fuel tank sensor technology. SSI accused DZEM of producing systems to reduce emissions for diesel truck engines that infringed U.S. Patent Nos. 8,733,153 and 9,535,038. In September 2021, a Wisconsin district court dismissed the patent infringement claims by SSI, as well as DZEM’s counterclaims that the patents were invalid.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), with Judge Stoll writing, earlier today reversed a denial of judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) of no infringement relating to U.S. Patent No. 9,031,521, which is assigned to Dali Wireless, Inc. The court also affirmed the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas on a number of other issues, including its denial of JMOL of invalidity of the ‘521 patent. The ‘521 patent is titled “System and Method for Digital Memorized Predistortion for Wireless Communication.” The patent solves the problem of unintended distortions to a signal caused by power amplifiers used to boost the signal on devices such as mobile phones. The patent does this through “through the use of a feedback loop and lookup tables.”
On May 5, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed the decision of the District Court for the Central District of California to vacate a judgment and injunction for Zinus, Inc., holding the district court did not abuse its discretion. The court concluded: “Here, Lawrie, Zinus’s president and expert witness, misrepresented his knowledge of highly material prior art. The district court properly declined to condone such conduct.”
Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision of the U.S. International Trade Commission in Mayborn Group, Ltd. v. ITC, wherein the U.S. International Trade Commission (the Commission) denied Mayborn’s petition for rescission of a general exclusion order that prohibited the importation of products that infringe U.S. Patent 8,028,850 (the ’850 patent). The CAFC held that, while Mayborn had standing to appeal, the Commission lacked the authority to adjudicate its patent invalidity claim and an assertion of patent invalidity was insufficient grounds to support a petition to rescind or modify an exclusion order.