Patent Law Practice Center

VW Challenge to Flexible Car Warning Light Among Reexamination Requests Filed Week of 9/6/11

Here is the latest installment of Reexamination Requests from Scott Daniels, of Reexamination Alert and Practice Center Contributor…

In January, the company Effectively Illuminated Pathways, LLC. sued Aston Martin of North America, Bentley and Volkswagen of America (Bentley’s parent company) for infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,520,669 for a flexibly mounted warning light for cars, presumably rather up-scale cars.  VW has now replied to that law suit by requesting reexamination of the ‘669 patent (see inter partes Request No. (1)), the request asserting 92 substantial new questions of patentability and weighing in at 1630 pages counting claim charts.

Cisco requested reexamination of a VirnetX patent (see inter partesRequest No. (10)) in a dispute described in greater detail in our second item posted today.  And SanDisk sought reexamination of a flash memory Netac patent (see inter partes Request No. (11)).

Also of interest last week was the fact that there were 16 inter partes reexamination requests and only 6 ex parte requests.  Normally, the ex parte cases exceed the inter partes.  Perhaps requesters are coming to the conclusion that full participation in the reexamination outweighs the risk of statutory estoppel attaching tointer partes requests. (more…)