Posts Tagged: "Northern District of California"

Apple requested that the Federal Circuit keep the case and the panel review the decision in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, while Samsung requested that the Federal Circuit remand the matter to the district court for a new trial on damages. The Federal Circuit adopted neither suggestion. Instead, the Federal Circuit chose to remand the case for further proceedings, which the panel explained may or may not include a new trial on damages. Judge Koh will decide whether a new trial on damages is necessary.

A patent and copyright squabble involving two players in the networking space for information technology (IT) development, which has ramped up in recent years, saw an interesting round of events play out in federal court and regulatory agencies this past December. At the center of the brouhaha is American networking and telecommunications giant Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) of San Jose, CA, which has filed multiple legal actions against Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) of Santa Clara, CA, alleging that Arista has moved into the networking equipment market using technologies developed and patented by Cisco, specifically through former Cisco employees who founded Arista.

LinkedIn recently filed suit in the Northern District of California against Doe Defendants for allegedly “scraping” data about its users from its website through fake profiles and software bots. LinkedIn alleges that the data scraping that was performed using fake profiles and bots was in violation of its user agreement, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, among other things.

Finjan Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: FNJN), the parent of wholly-owned subsidiary Finjan, Inc., announced several weeks ago that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) issued the final rulings on attempts by Symantec Corporation’s (NASDAQ: SYMC) to invalidate 8 different Finjan’s patents through inter partes review (“IPR”). In total, Symantec filed 11…

2015 is the second straight year in which the list of top plaintiffs has been led by eDekka LLC, a patent holding company, which at times has been accused of exhibiting trolling behaviors… Atop this list was the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (N.D. Cal.), which between 2005 and 2015 has awarded more than $2.1 billion in compensatory damages over the course of 2,169 cases filed. Following behind them was the U.S. District for the Southern District of California (S.D. Cal.), U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.), and followed in fourth place by E.D. Tex. Median damages for cases terminating between 2000 and 2015 showed a different story, however, as that list was topped by the District of Delaware, which had a median award of $10.46 million in 40 cases with damages. The Eastern District of Texas follows in second with a $7.68 million median damages award and in third is the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (E.D. Va.), with a median award of $2.98 million. After that, there’s a steep drop and every other district is showing a median damages award of less than $1 million.

That Finjan would prevail in six separate IPR institution decisions relating to the same patent litigation seems an extraordinary long shot. While Finjan has not said it in a press release or to me directly (see more later), allow me to notice that this speaks volumes both about the relative strength of the Finjan patents and the relative weakness of the Symantec invalidity case against these patents. If the PTAB wasn’t even willing to take another look in a proceeding that is so hopelessly stacked against the patent owner these patents are about as rock solid from a validity standpoint as they could possibly be.