Posts Tagged: "Judge Kara Stoll"

The Federal Circuit recently issued an opinion vacating the district court’s grant of summary judgment motions of non-infringement and remanding with instructions to enforce a settlement agreement between Serta Simmons Bedding, LLC and Dreamwell, Ltd. (collectively, “Serta Simmons”) and Casper Sleep Inc. (“Casper”). See Serta Simmons Bedding, LLC v. Casper Sleep Inc., No. 19-1098, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 4467 (Fed Cir.…

The Federal Circuit recently elected not to decide en banc “whether servers are a regular and established place of business, such that venue is proper under 35 U.S.C. § 1400(b). In re: Google LLC, No. 2018-152 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 5, 2019) (Before Prost, Chief Judge, Newman, Lourie, Dyk, Moore, O’Malley, Reyna, Wallach, Taranto, Chen, Hughes, and Stoll, Circuit Judges) (Dissent by Reyna, Circuit Judge, joined by Newman and Lourie, Circuit Judges). SEVEN Networks, LLC’s (SEVEN) patent infringement suit against Google arose in the Eastern District of Texas. SEVEN alleged Google’s servers, stored in a third-party ISP’s facility, where the allegedly infringing activities occurred, were a regular and established place of business, such that venue is proper under 35 U.S.C. § 1400(b). The district court denied Google’s motion to dismiss for improper venue. As a result, Google petitioned the Federal Circuit for a writ of mandamus directing the district court to dismiss or transfer the case for improper venue. On appeal, the panel majority found mandamus relief inappropriate because “it is not known if the district court’s ruling involves the kind of broad and fundamental legal questions relevant to § 1400(b),” and “it would be appropriate to allow the issue to percolate in the district courts so as to more clearly define the importance, scope, and nature of the issue for us to review.”

On January 10, the Federal Circuit issued an opinion affirming a decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) invalidating several claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,597,812 (the ‘812 patent) as obvious. Realtime Data, LLC v. Iancu, No. 2018-1154 (Fed Cir. Jan. 10, 2019) (Before Dyk, Taranto, and Stoll, Circuit Judges) (Opinion for the court, Stoll, Circuit Judge).

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., HP Enterprise Services, LLC, and Teradata Operations, Inc. (collectively, HP) sought inter partes review (IPR) of U.S. Patent No. 6,597,812, alleging that the claims were obvious under 35 U.S.C. §103(a) over U.S. Patent No. 4, 929, 946 (O’Brien) and further, in view of a data compression textbook by Mark Nelson (Nelson). After instituting review, the PTAB found the challenged claims obvious over the prior art. Realtime Data appealed on two grounds: (1) that the PTAB erred in determining that a person of ordinary skill would have been motivated to combine the teachings of O’Brien and Nelson, and (2) that the PTAB erred by failing to properly construe the term “maintaining the dictionary”.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit accepted HP’s primary argument that all of the challenged claims were disclosed in O’Brien, with Nelson used only to demonstrate that the term “dictionary encoder” used in the ‘812 patent was actually what was disclosed in O’Brien. HP thus relied on Nelson merely to explain that O’Brien’s algorithm was a dictionary algorithm, which Realtime conceded. Because the PTAB did not rely on Nelson for the disclosure of any particular element or teaching and instead relied on O’Brien alone to supply the elements and teachings, there was no obligation to make any finding regarding a motivation to combine O’Brien and Nelson. Therefore, the PTAB “did not err when it concluded that claim 1 was invalid under § 103 based on O’Brien alone,” Judge Stoll wrote.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently reversed a district court’s grant of motion to dismiss a declaratory judge action against Plano Encryption Technologies LLC (PET). The district court, which is situated in the Northern District of Texas, held that PET’s contacts with the Northern district did not subject it to personal jurisdiction and venue was thus improper. On appeal, the Federal Circuit reversed and remanded for further proceedings… While personal jurisdiction and venue are fact-dependent inquiries, sending patent enforcement letters to a recipient located and doing business in a forum can be enough to establish personal jurisdiction over the sending party in the forum such that venue is proper in the forum. Such a finding may be particularly true when the sending party’s “sole business is to enforce its intellectual property.”

The Federal Circuit issued a nonprecedential decision in Indivior Inc. v. Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, S.A., which vacated a preliminary injunction handed out by the District of New Jersey in a Hatch-Waxman patent infringement case brought by British pharmaceutical firm Indivior. The Federal Circuit panel majority concluded that the district court had abused its discretion in granting the injunction. The majority found that the ‘305 patent’s specification disparaged, and therefore disclaimed, the method of drying the films with the use of conventional methods which only dry the top of the film. Judge Pauline Newman authored a dissenting opinion in which she explained she would have found the district court’s preliminary injunction grant sustained on appeal. According to Judge Newman, the majority’s decision imported the drying limitation from the ‘514 patent claims into the ‘305 patent claims despite the fact that the ‘305 patent was amended specifically to remove this limitation.

On Tuesday, November 20th, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a nonprecedential decision in Google LLC v. Conversant Wireless Licensing, which vacated a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to uphold the validity of patent claims owned by Conversant after conducting an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding petitioned by Google and LG Electronics… It is hard to reconcile decisions where the Federal Circuit bends over backwards to give more process and procedural rights to petitioners when for so long patent owners have been railroaded at the PTAB and then had those summary execution proceedings rubber stamped by the Federal Circuit. If increased scrutiny on the PTAB is a two-way street I welcome it.

In Enplas Display Device Corp. v. Seoul Semiconductor Co., the Federal Circuit vacated a $4 million damages award to Seoul Semiconductor Co. (“Seoul”), holding that the district court erred when it denied Enplas Display Device Corp.’s (“Enplas”) motion for judgment as a matter of law that the damages award was not supported by substantial evidence.

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.

REAL argued in its petition that step two of the Alice test used to determine invalidity under Section 101 requires questions of fact that were never asked by the lower court. To invalidate without asking those questions contradicts the Federal Circuit’s recent holdings in Berkheimer v. HP and Aatrix Software v. Green Shades Software. REAL’s appeal to the Federal Circuit was decided by a panel including Circuit Judges Alan Lourie, Evan Wallach and Kara Stoll, a trio where the majority has held that step two of Alice is a pure question of law, which is a misapplication of the Alice standard. REAL further contended that both the district court and the Federal Circuit disregarded the factual record in their Alice analysis; that the patents-in-suit claim patentable improvements to computer user interface technology; and that the district court found that there were material facts in dispute while also finding that the claims were well-understood, routine and conventional.

Judge Kara Stoll: ‘As somebody who has worked in patents for a long time I realize it can be very difficult for clients where you’ve invested in your intellectual property under one set of rules only to have the rules completely change and your intellectual property is then of no value or of uncertain value. And on 101 I also think it is important not to confuse Sections 102 and 103, but that said to the extend there is any need for change that would be for Congress or the Supreme Court.’

In Bennett Regulator Guards, Inc. v. Atlanta Gas Light Co. the Federal Circuit ruled the time-bar for filing a petition for inter partes review in Section 315(b) begins to run as soon as a complaint for infringement is served in district court, regardless of whether the complaint is involuntarily or voluntarily dismissed or is ultimately successful on the merits. There are no exceptions to the statutory time limit for filing a petition for inter partes review in 35 U.S.C. § 315(b).

The Federal Circuit reversed the District of Delaware’s decision to invalidate Orexo’s opioid treatment patent as obvious because obviousness was not proved by clear and convincing evidence. Specifically, the Court pointed to the absence of a teaching in the prior art that citric acid could serve as a carrier particle for the drug agonist.  The Court also noted that the lower court improperly discounted evidence of objective indicia of nonobviousness.

One might naturally expect that, if a rejection under § 101 appealed from the PTAB failed to address all the claim limitations and had zero supporting evidence to determine whether something was abstract or well-understood, routine and conventional, the case would be a slam-dunk at the Federal Circuit.  After all, according to Supreme Court and Federal Circuit precedent, the Federal Circuit would be “powerless to affirm the administrative action by substituting what it considers to be a more adequate or proper basis.” Unfortunately though, nothing could be farther from the truth as is demonstrated by the Federal Circuit’s recent decision of In re Villena, Appeal No. 2017-2069 (August 29, 2018) where, as is proved by the joint appendix, the examiner failed to address each and every claim limitation separately, to address the claim limitations as a whole, ordered combination, and to provide any evidence whatsoever to support his factual assertions.

In Click-To-Call Technologies v. Ingenio, Inc., Yellowpages.com, LLC, the Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, held §315(b) precludes IPR institution when the IPR petitioner was served with a complaint for patent infringement more than one year before filing its petition, even if the district court action in which the petitioner was so served was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice.