Source: http://techrights.org/2018/09/03/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 02:09:19+00:00

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The connections between Dominion Harbor and Microsoft aren’t as blurry as Microsoft might have hoped. It’s not hard to see where this patent troll is receiving the lion’s share of its patents from. Microsoft uses trolls such as this to sell its ‘protection’ racket [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20]. We offered a new example of it only several days ago.
Microsoft’s new patents are being celebrated in Apple and Microsoft advocacy sites [1, 2, 3], where people like Christian de Looper and Apple fans (that celebrate Apple patents) take note of new Apple patents and/or patent applications [1, 2] never mind if Microsoft and Apple are both notorious for their patent aggression. Brand loyalty can blind some people.
To be fair to both, they are also on the receiving end of troll lawsuits. We hope that many such lawsuits can eventually compel them to rethink their stance on patents and their patent strategy.
As the mainstream media noted a few days ago, Apple might need to pay over half a billion dollars to just one patent troll. The Eastern District of Texas supports this particularly notorious patent troll, VirnetX, which targets large companies. Time to appeal for the Federal Circuit (or even SCOTUS perhaps) to step in?
VirnetX Holding Corp. (NYSEAMERICAN: VHC) announced Friday morning that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has affirmed an April 2018 jury verdict granting the company a $506.2 million award in a patent infringement case against Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). The court denied Apple’s request for a new trial in the case, and it also includes supplemental damages, a sunset royalty (paid when infringing products are phased out) and interest and costs.
Additionally, the complaints preemptively make certain allegations regarding the patentability of the ‘748 patent, apparently assuming a validity challenge in this wonderful world of Alice in which we are all forced to live. The patentability allegations list technical problems ostensibly addressed by the ‘748 patent, possibly to frame the ‘748 patent as an improvement to computer functionality for future reliance on the Federal Circuit’s guidance in Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 822 F.3d 1327 (Fed. Cir. 2016) that such improvements may be found non-abstract at step one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s two-step Alice framework for determining patent eligibility. The allegations regarding patentability found in Fall Line’s complaints also include statements that certain claim elements are not well-understood, routine, or conventional, apparently in case the ‘748 patent is held to be abstract and thus necessitating reliance on step two of the two-step Alice framework.
It’s also worth noting that even though the terminal disclaimer issue might be a fatal blow to Fall Line’s ability to enforce the ‘748 patent, Fall Line’s problems do not end there. The ‘748 patent has also had an inter partes review (IPR) instituted against it as of April 5, 2018, though the IPR was not instituted against Claim 1. Furthermore, petitioner Unified Patents did not challenge the validity of Claim 1 and so even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in SAS Institute v. Iancu back in April that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board does not have the authority to partially institute a petition for IPR against some but not all requested claims, Claim 1 looks like it will survive. But that’s not to say any of the defendants accused of infringement by Fall Line will refrain from filing their own IPRs to challenge Claim 1.
The inter partes review (IPR) would likely put this lawsuit to rest, but how much money will have been spent on lawyers by then?
On Monday, August 27th, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential opinion in Ericsson Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures I which vacated a previous decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to uphold patent claims owned by Intellectual Ventures in light of an obviousness challenge from Ericsson.
THE USPTO would almost certainly be granting patents like a patent-printing machine if it wasn’t for constant scrutiny from patent courts and groups like the EFF, CCIA and so on. Sadly, as we’ve just noted, 35 U.S.C. § 101 isn’t taken seriously enough by the Office. The new Director, a litigation person whose firm worked for Donald Trump, keeps trying to water it down. It cannot be done unless courts leave an opening/gap to be cherry-picked; as things stand, SCOTUS supports Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs) and the Federal Circuit gave away nothing but Berkheimer, which the Director (Iancu) was happy to exploit irrespective of the facts (Berkheimer has not changed anything in the courts).
On August 15, 2018, the Federal Circuit affirmed the invalidation of BSG Tech LLC’s (“BSG”) patents as ineligible subject matter. See BSG Tech LLC v. Buyseasons, Inc., No. 2017-1980, 2018 WL 3862646 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 15, 2018) (before Reyna, Wallach, and Hughes, J.) (opinion by Hughes, J.).
BSG asserted three patents with similar specifications that were directed to a “self-evolving generic index” for organizing information stored in a database — U.S. Patents No. 6,035,294, 6,243,699, and 6,195,652. The patents were “self-evolving” because users of the database could “add new parameters for use in describing items”, with guidance from the system, which would allow the database to be searched according to the new and existing parameters.
We generally prefer not to quote Watchtroll, but in order to understand what patent maximalists are up to it’s helpful to keep an eye on Watchtroll. Last week they used the term “IP Assets” in the headline (three lies in two words). Katharine Wolanyk generally alludes to universities using taxpayers-funded research to feed patent trolls that then attack the public as “Legal Finance” (what a breathtaking euphemism!). Her innovation seems to be that of euphemisms for bad practices that should be banned if not severely punished for (penalties, fines, maybe even sanctions).
The Federal Circuit further restricted a petitioner’s ability to appeal a decision by the Patent and Trademark Appeal Board upholding the validity of a patent. The court this month found in JTEKT v. GKN Automotive that a competitor who filed a petition for inter partes review could not appeal the PTAB’s validity determination because its product design was not definite enough to create a concrete and substantial risk of infringement or the likelihood of a claim of infringement. If this line of decisions stands, it will make it harder for competitors to clear the field of conflicting patents that they believe are invalid, as there would be no ability to appeal from an adverse Board decision.
This is nonsense. He also uses his disability to add an angle that has nothing to do with his patent/s; sympathy-garnering exercise at best. If his patent is worth what he believes, why should he fear PTAB? In our experience, people who loathe PTAB are those whose patents are of questionable quality (and deep inside they know it).
Shortly after several new patent reform bills were introduced in Congress over the summer, a new, even more radical piece of legislation has entered the scene.
RALIA would also rewrite the statute on patent eligibility, making it easier to obtain software and so-called business method patents, a process that the Supreme Court’s 2014 landmark Alice decision has strongly affected. The legislation contends that “the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence concerning subject matter patentability has harmed the progress of science and the useful arts” and loosens its strictures.
No, it does the exact opposite. But don’t let facts get in the way of career lobbyists.
These are all just anti-PTAB bills whose net effect is reduction in quality assessment and decline in patent quality. They rely on the perception that there’s anger, that there’s a scandal, and that there are feuds.
Addressing whether an inter partes review (IPR) petition was time barred under 35 USC § 315(b), the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded a finding by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that the petitioner was not a real party in interest to the entity that had been served with an infringement complaint in district court more than one year earlier. Applications in Internet Time, LLC v. RPX Corp., Case Nos. 17-1698, -1699, -1701 (Fed. Cir. July 9, 2018) (O’Malley, J) (Reyna, J, concurring).
Applications in Internet Time (AIT) sued Salesforce.com, a software company, for patent infringement. Salesforce was served with a copy of the complaint on November 20, 2013.
Judge Reyna wrote separately to point out an independent ground for vacating the PTAB’s decision, namely that it failed to address whether RPX was also a “privy” of Salesforce. A petitioner is time barred under § 315(b) from filing a petition more than one year after the “petitioner, the real party in interest, or privy of the petitioner is served with a complaint.” Judge Reyna explained that a number of additional factors must be considered to determine privity, including whether a legal relationship exists between the parties or whether one party acted as a proxy/representative for the other party. In the case of RPX and Salesforce, a contractual relationship existed, and RPX may have been acting as Salesforce’s proxy. Therefore, Judge Reyna would have instructed the PTAB to also thoroughly review whether RPX and Salesforce were in privity in these circumstances.
Patent law has traditionally been considered to be fraught with traps for the unwary, which in practice just means that it is unwise to assume anything (see Carl S. Koening, “Clarifying Patent Terminology and Patent Concepts – An Introduction to Some Basic Concepts and Doctrine,” 15 Cath. U. L. Rev. 1 (1966)). Petitioner for an inter partes review proceeding, Vizio, Inc., v. ATI Technologies ULC suffered the consequences of one of those traps, when its petition for review of U.S. Patent No. 7,633,506 was deemed untimely under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) because the petition was not filed within one year of Patent Owner filing suit against Petitioner Vizio. While a seemingly simple docketing matter, in this case the error arose over when (i.e., what date) the complaint was filed.
As set forth in the Board’s Decision denying institution, the facts are these. Vizio filed its IPR petition on February 1, 2017, one year after receiving the complaint. Patent Owner filed an affidavit of service, establishing that Patent Owner had mailed the complaint to Vizio on January 30, 2017. The question before the Board was whether the one-year time period under § 315(b) for filing an IPR petition ran from the date of mailing by Patent Owner or the date of receipt of the complaint by Petitioner Vizio.
To answer this question, the Board looked to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(h)(1)(A), which states that a corporation is served “in the manner prescribed by Rule 4(e)(1) for serving an individual.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(e)(1) states that service on an individual under the Rules is done “following state law for serving a summons in an action brought in courts of general jurisdiction in the state where the district court is located” (or where service is made). Thus, the Board reasoned, the time and manner where service was accomplished was a matter of Delaware law (where the Patent Owner was incorporated).

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