Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-916_f2ah.pdf
Page Number: 21.0

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THRYV, INC. v. CLICK-TO-CALL TECHNOLOGIES, LP 

GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

I 
Our story stretches back to the 1990s, when Stephen Du-
Val invented a system for anonymizing telephone calls.  Be-
lieving in the promise of his idea, Mr. DuVal hired an attor-
ney  to  secure  a  patent  and  sought  avenues  to  bring  his
invention  to  market.  Initially,  both  efforts  met  with  suc-
cess.  In  1998,  Mr.  DuVal  was  awarded  a  U. S.  Patent, 
which he licensed to a company called InfoRocket.com, Inc. 
But problems soon emerged.  In 2001, InfoRocket accused 
Ingenio, Inc., a predecessor of today’s petitioner Thryv, Inc.,
of  infringing  Mr.  DuVal’s  patent.   The  case  carried  on  in 
federal district court for more than a year before InfoRocket 
and Ingenio decided to merge.  The companies then jointly
persuaded the court to dismiss InfoRocket’s lawsuit without 
prejudice.

Still, the quiet did not last long.  Following the merger,
the surviving entity—for simplicity, call it  Thryv—sought
to turn the tables on Mr. DuVal by asking the Patent Office
to reconsider the validity of his patent in an ex parte reex-
amination.    That  agency-led  process  dragged  on  for  four 
more years, and ended with a mixed verdict:  The Patent 
Office canceled a few claims, but amended others and per-
mitted Mr. DuVal to add some new ones too. 

Even  the  ex parte  reexamination  wasn’t  enough  to  put 
the  parties’  disputes  to  rest.  During  the  reexamination, 
Thryv terminated its license with Mr. DuVal and stopped 
paying  him  royalties.    But  it  seems  that  Thryv  continued
using the patented technology all the same.  So Mr. Duval 
transferred his patent to respondent Click-to-Call Technol-
ogies LP (CTC), which swiftly took the patent back to court.
CTC  noted  that  Thryv  couldn’t  exactly  plead  ignorance
about this patent, given that the company or its predeces-
sors  had  previously  licensed  the  patent,  been  sued  for  in-
fringing  it,  and  asked  the  Patent  Office  to  reexamine  it. 
When  it  came  to  Mr.  DuVal’s  patent,  CTC  alleged,  Thryv