Patent Law Practice Center

Collateral Estoppel Prevents Reexam Claim from being Enforced

On November 19, 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in e.Digital Corporation v. Futurewei Technologies, Inc. e.Digital appealed from a judgment of non-infringement made by the U.S. Federal District Court for the Southern District of California. The district court based its determination of non-infringement on the fact that e.Digital was collaterally estopped from seeking a construction of a claim limitation in e.Digital’s U.S. Patent Nos. 5,491,774 and 5,839,108 different from another court’s previous construction of the same limitation in the ’774 patent.

The Federal Circuit, with Judge Moore writing and joined by Judges O’Malley and Reyna, held that the district court correctly applied collateral estoppel to the ’774 patent, but improperly applied the doctrine to the unrelated ’108 patent.

To understand the ruling in this case one must first look at the prior case that construed the critical claim. Previously, in a litigation in the United States Federal District Court for the District of Colorado, e.Digital asserted claims 1 and 19 of the ’774 patent. The ’774 patent discloses a device with a microphone and a removable, interchangeable flash memory recording medium that allows for audio recording and playback. Asserted claims 1 and 19 recited “a flash memory module which operates as sole memory of the received processed sound electrical signals.” The district court construed the sole memory limitation to require “that the device use only flash memory, not RAM or any other memory system” to store the “received processed sound electrical signals.” The district court based its construction on the written description of the ’774 patent and its determination that the use of RAM had been disclaimed during prosecution. With this claim construction decided, the parties stipulated to a dismissal of the case with prejudice.

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Top 5 Patent Law Blog Posts of the Week

Today we continue our weekly installment highlighting the best of the patent blogosphere from the past week. If there are any patent blogs you think should be highlighted by our Top 5, please comment on this post and we’ll check them out.

1) IP Watchdog: Patent Mass Aggregators: The Giants Among Us – Written by guest authors Tom Ewing and Professor Robin Feldman, this post discusses how a handful of entities have amassed vast treasuries of patents on an unprecedented scale. The post points out how it is important to understand the method of organization and the types of activities that are causing a paradigm shift in the world of patents and innovation.

2) Patently-O: New Post Grant Options and Associated Proposed Fees – This post lists the new fees for petition for post-grant opposition or covered business method patent review, a petition for inter partes review, a petition for ex parte reexamination, supplemental examination, derivation, and third party submission of prior art in pending cases. (more…)

The Best of the Post-Grant USPTO Proceedings Seminar

In case you missed it, PLI hosted a seminar entitled Post-Grant USPTO Proceedings 2012- The New Patent Litigation and the topics discussed by the day’s panelists proved to serve as both a refresher on the language of the new law as well as an enlightening course on what the developments in practice have and will become. If there was a trend throughout the day, it would be that patent professionals need to become familiarized with the changes in patent law in order to streamline their time and resources into more efficient patent applications and to facilitate  the litigation process. Requirements that had become common place in patent law are no longer on the books, but a patent practitioner would not know this unless they studied the America Invents Act provision by provision – or unless they attended PLI’s seminar.

To show you the range of topics that were discussed, here are some of the highlights from each panel of the seminar. The course handbook is still available, and the video recording of the entire seminar will be made available soon for On Demand viewing on the PLI website. (more…)

eBay Attack on Purple Leaf Electronic Transaction Patent Among the Reexamination Requests Filed Week of Jan. 23rd

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

Last week eBay replied to an infringement action filed against it in the Eastern District of Texas by Purple Leaf by seeking reexamination of the patent-in-suit (see inter partes Request No. (2)).  The Purple Leaf patent claims a process for conducting electronic transactions and making payments over the Internet.

The winner for the most reexamination requests filed wasNanosolar that challenged three Solannex patents related to photovoltaic cells (see ex parte Request Nos. (5), (6) & (7)).  The companies are in litigation over these patents in the Northern District of California.

Ex parte Request No. (4), involving U.S. Patent No. 5,337,753 owned by Biosig Instruments and claiming a heart rate monitor, is interesting in that it expressly calls for the PTO to “clarify the record” regarding the meaning of the claims.  The Request notes the ‘753 patent has been through an earlier reexamination, but that the trial judge in a pending infringement action has refused to rely on the patentee’s assertions in that earlier reexamination because they are “ambiguous.”  (more…)

Post Grant Dead Zone Coming Soon

Written by Scott McKeown, Partner at Oblon Spivak, Practice Center Contributor and author of Patents Post Grant blog.

PGR Window Anomaly to Encourage Early Litigation?

Post Grant Review (PGR) is limited to patents maturing from applications filed on or after March 16, 2013 (note, the exception for business method patents, Sec. 18 of the AIA).  Of course, it will take several years for such patents to issue from the USPTO. Thus, practically speaking, PGR will not be an option for third parties seeking to challenge the validity of an issued patent until at least the second half of this decade. Nevertheless, the PGR statutes will have a significant impact on third party options and parallel litigation strategy going forward.

As a reminder, patents eligible for PGR that are not business method patents, are those that are within 9 months of issuance, or re-issuance for broadening reissues (§ 321 (c)).

When fashioning the Inter Partes Review (IPR) statutes, Congress mandated that IPR may not be requested until the later of 9 months from patent issuance, or if PGR is instituted the date of termination (§ 311(c)). This timing limit is meant to ensure that PGR and IPR are not conducted in parallel. IPR, unlike PGR,  becomes available for all patents next September 16, 2012. (more…)