Source: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/12/index.html
Timestamp: 2013-12-10 06:56:13
Document Index: 750827129

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 101', '§102', '§ 101', '§ 112', '§ 112', '§ 101', '§ 112', '§ 101', '§112', '§ 101']

Posted on Dec 31, 2012 at 09:26 AM | Permalink
Carnegie Mellon v. Marvell: Another $1b verdict. By Dennis Crouch
Marvell's stock price plunged about 10% following news that a jury had awarded well over $1 billion patent infringement verdict to Carnegie Mellon University. Download MarvellVerdict. The verdict is based upon finding of direct literal infringement of claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180. The CMU hometown Pittsburgh jury also found that Marvell induced infringement by encouraging customers to use its chips. Regarding validity, the jury held that the asserted claims were neither anticipated nor obvious. One of the key pieces of evidence in the trial was an old email from a Seagate engineer noting that the CMU invention went well beyond the current state of the art. (Of course, that email was focused on advances found in the disclosure rather than the broad claims asserted by CMU.) Seagate was apparently happy to provide that document to be used against its market competitor. It is that same Seagate engineer's prior patent application that served as the core of Marvell unsuccessful invalidity argument. An interesting element of the verdict involved particular willfulness questions. The jury particularly held that (1) Marvell knew of the asserted patent before the lawsuit; (2) had no reasonable defense for its actions; and (3) knew or should have known that its actions were infringing. The verdict did not, however, ask whether the action was "willful." CMU will ask the court to rely upon those answers to treble the damage award. If the damage award is trebled (tripled) and interest added, the award will be roughly equivalent to Marvell's $3.8b market valuation. (The award is larger than CMU's current endowment.) In the initial complaint, CMU also requested attorney fees and a permanent injunction. This is the second billion dollar judgment against a Quinn Emanuel client awarded in the past few months. Marvell has announced that it will prevail on appeal. In a pretrial ruling, district court judge Nora Fischer denied Marvell's motion for summary judgment of anticipation, but noted that it was a "close call" based upon her construction of the asserted claims. Marvell did not exercise its authority to seek a reexamination of the patent at the USPTO. Over the next six months, both parties will file and respond to post-verdict motions. Judge Fischer announced her intention to make a final ruling in the case in May 2013. If the verdict is confirmed by Judge Fischer, Marvell will then have an opportunity to appeal after posting a "supersedeas bond." If the damage award is roughly equivalent
The asserted patent claims are basically signal processing logic algorithms for determining the value of items coming from a computer memory signal. This is necessary because the "0" and "1" that we normally talk about for binary digital signals is not actually accurate. In particular, the invention indicates that you should apply a "signal dependent" function to calculate the value as a way to overcome noise in the signal. Apparently a key distinguishing factor from the prior art is that the decoding functions used are "selected from a set of signal-dependent functions." The asserted claims do not identify the particular functions used, only that functions are used. The two infringing claims are as follows: Claim 4 of US Patent 6,201,839:
A method of determining branch metric values for branches of a trellis for a Viterbi-like detector, comprising: selecting a branch metric function for each of the branches at a certain time index from a set of signal-dependent branch metric functions; and applying each of said selected functions to a plurality of signal samples to determine the metric value corresponding to the branch for which the applied branch metric function was selected, wherein each sample corresponds to a different sampling time instant.
A method of determining branch metric values in a detector, comprising: receiving a plurality of time variant signal samples, the signal samples having one of signal-dependent noise, correlated noise, and both signal dependent and correlated noise associated therewith; selecting a branch metric function at a certain time index; and applying the selected function to the signal samples to determine the metric values, wherein the branch metric function is selected from a set of signal-dependent branch metric functions.
Posted on Dec 30, 2012 at 08:48 AM | Permalink
H.R. 6621 has passed in the Senate, but only after the Senate eliminated section (m) of the bill that would have brought to light information regarding the hundreds of "pre-GATT" patent applications that have been pending since 1995. According to Capitol Hill rumors, well known patentee Gil Hyatt was able to convince one Senator to put a hold on the bill that would have eliminated possibility of passage barring the amendment. Hyatt apparently has a number of applications pending that claim architecture and logic design of very basic integrated circuits. There are several hundred of these pre-GATT applications pending. The majority are apparently ones delayed because of Department of Defense secrecy orders. However, a substantial number would be properly classified as submarine patents whose existence is currently unknown but that potentially claim a broad scope of coverage that could potentially cover elements of an entire mature industry (such as integrated circuits). Because the Senate amended the bill, it must be passed again by the House and signed by the President before conclusion of the term. Related articles
Posted on Dec 29, 2012 at 11:32 AM | Permalink
Guest Post by Julie Samuels. Samuels holds an endowed chair at EFF aptly named the Mark Cuban Chair to Elimiate Stupid Patents. EFF's brief in the CLS Bank case is available here: http://www.patentlyo.com/files/eff--iso-cls.pdf. Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Bilski ruling, the Federal Circuit has been consistent on only one
point in its § 101 jurisprudence—and that’s on being inconsistent. In the face
of the Federal Circuit’s failure to provide a workable § 101 standard, the
Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in Mayo v. Prometheus, essentially telling the Federal Circuit to take
the patentable subject matter inquiry seriously. Yet the Federal Circuit paid
no heed when it issued ruled in CLS Bank
v. Alice, all but ignoring the Supreme Court (for many of us court watchers, the Federal Circuit’s failure to
address Mayo was shocking; even Judge
Prost, in her dissent, admonished the majority for “fail[ing] to follow the
Supreme Court’s instructions—not just in its holding, but more importantly in
its approach.”).
So it really was no surprise when the Federal Circuit agreed
to take CLS en banc. We, along with
many others, hope that this case would provide the Court an opportunity to head
the Bilski Court’s warning that:
The Information Age empowers people with new capacities to
perform statistical analyses and mathematical calculations with a speed and
sophistication that enable the design of protocols for more efficient
performance of a vast number of business tasks. If a high enough bar is not set
when considering patent applications of this sort, patent examiners and courts
could be flooded with claims that would put a chill on creative endeavor and
dynamic change. (130 S. Ct. at 3229).
As currently interpreted, § 101 leaves parties unable to
discern a patent’s metes and bounds or assess its validity, making inadvertent
infringement an unfortunate cost of doing business. This has led to a dangerous
and dramatic increase in patent litigation, particularly surrounding business
method patents or those covering software. For better or worse (and I think
worse), the major uptick in these cases involved non-practicing entities. Some
data that we included in our amicus
brief filed in CLS Bank:
From 200-2002, NPE litigation accounting for
only about five percent of patent litigation;[1]
in 2007 that figure was 22 percent and in 2011 it was 40 percent.[2]
Litigation surrounding software patents has also
greatly increased:
For the first time in 2011, spending by both
Apple and Google on patents exceeded the firms’ spending on new product
research and development.[4]
NPEs now disproportionately target small
companies; at least 55% of unique defendants sued by NPEs make under $10
million a year.[5]
These statistics are a direct result of the legal
instability surrounding § 101. One way to stem this problem is to create
incentives for those facing litigation (or litigation threats) to pursue their
meritorious defenses of noninfringement and invalidity. Section 101 could play
that role, in fact, the Mayo Court seemed
to state as much: “to shift the patent-eligibility inquiry entirely to these
late sections [§§102, 103, 112] risks creating significantly greater legal
uncertainty, while assuming that those sections can do work that they are not
equipped to do.” 132 S. Ct. at 1304.
Yet no version of recent § 101 jurisprudence offers much hope
of settling the law. Instead, we recommended in our brief (filed along with
Public Knowledge) that the Federal Circuit take another route and adopt a
stricter construction of § 112(f), as recently proposed
by Prof. Mark Lemley. Specifically, instead of attempting to figure out whether
a broad, functional claim is abstract or not, a court may first use § 112(f) to
narrow the claim to the structures and their equivalents recited in the patent
and then, if questions remain, make a § 101 inquiry. While § 112(f) has traditionally been applied to apparatus
claims, it’s clear that Congress intended it to apply to method claims as well.
Despite this, software patents often do not detail actual algorithms or explain
how to actually carry out the methods they attempt to claim; as such they
should be indefinite under cases like Aristocrat
Techs. v. Int’l Game Tech. If the claims do specify the algorithms, then
the § 101 inquiry will be limited to those algorithms and their equivalents.
These questions—of whether §112(f) applies; if it does, how the claims should
be limited; and then if § 101 permits that narrowed claim—could all be
accomplished at early stages of litigation, before expensive discovery and
James Bessen, Jennifer Ford and Michael Meurer, The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls, Boston Univ. School of
Law, Working Paper No. 11-45, 2011 (“Bessen 2011”), at 6.
Sara Jeruss, Robin Feldman & Joshua Walker, The America Invents Act 500: Effects of Patent Monetization Entities on
US Litigation (2012) at 5, 25.
James Bessen, A Generation of Software
Patents, Boston Univ. School of Law, Working Paper No. 11-31 (June 21,
2011), at 19
Zak Islam, Smartphone Industry Spent $20
Billion on Patents in 2011, tom’s hardware (October 9, 2012), http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Patents-Smartphone-Apple-Google-Motorola,18231.html
Colleen Chien, Startups and Patent Trolls,
Santa Clara Univ. School of Law, Accepted Paper No. 09-12 (September 28, 2012)
Posted on Dec 28, 2012 at 05:46 AM | Permalink
new Track 1 Prioritized Examination program allows an applicant to reach final
disposition (allowance, final rejection, abandonment) within 12 months of
filing. To qualify for this program, an applicant must file a simple, one-page
petition and a $4800 petition fee ($2400 for small entities). According to the
USPTO’s Track 1 website, the current pendency to final disposition is just over
5 months.[2] But how does Track 1 compare to the USPTO’s
other programs for expediting examination?
the USPTO offers three other programs for expediting examination of utility
applications: Accelerated Examination (AE), the Patent Prosecution Highway
(PPH), and Petitions to Make Special based on an applicant’s age or health.
Like Track 1, AE’s goal is to reach final disposition within 12 months of
filing. Unlike Track 1, an applicant pays only a nominal petitions fee, but
must conduct a search and submit an accelerated examination support document
characterizing the search results. The PPH, in contrast, does not require a fee
or a support document; rather, the applicant files a PPH request based on an
allowance or favorable search report from a corresponding foreign or PCT
application (if necessary, the U.S. claims must be amended to “sufficiently
correspond” to the allowable foreign claims.) According to the USPTO, examination of a PPH case should begin about 2–3
months after the PPH request is granted.[3] And unlike the Track 1 and AE petitions,
which must be filed with the application, a PPH request can be filed any time
before examination begins. Petitions to Make Special based on an applicant’s
age or health are free, but apply only to those applicants older than 65 or in
very poor health. Which of
these programs is the best? To answer
that question, we reviewed approximately 350 applications filed in these
programs since 2006 (the Track 1 applications date only from that program’s
institution on September 26, 2011.) We
then determined the average and median times from effective filing date to date
of allowance for the allowed applications in our sample, plus the standard
deviation in these times:
Days from Effective
Filing Date to Allowance
Petition to Make Special Based on
We found that the Track 1 applications were
allowed on average 184 days after the application’s effective filing date,
compared to 317 days for AE, 565 days for the PPH, and 806 days for
applications made special based on an applicant’s age.[4]
For reference, the average application pendency across non-expedited
applications in 2011 was about 1240 days (1022 days when counting RCEs as new
filings).[5]
The data were clear: for the allowed applications in our sample, Track 1 was
not the whole story. Despite its
relatively high up-front cost, Track 1 applications may also be the least
expensive to prosecute, especially for small entities. To estimate prosecution costs, we tabulated
the mean number of office actions for the allowed applications in our sample.
Multiplying the mean number of office actions by an estimated cost to the
applicant for preparing and filing a response and adding the extra petition
costs, if any, yields an “expectation cost” for each program. We did not
account for RCE costs because there were less than 3 office actions, on
average, per application in each program.
that, on average, there were only 1.2 office actions to allowance for the Track
1 applications, 1.3 office actions for PPH applications, 1.7 office actions for
AE applications, and 2.2 office actions for applications made special based on
an applicant’s age. (For reference, the USPTO averages about 2.7 office actions
per final disposal for other cases.[6])
If the cost of responding to an office action is about $2600 per recent AIPLA
data,[7]
then the expectation cost of filing and prosecuting a Track 1 application at
large entity rates is $7920 (i.e., 1.2 × 2600 + 4800). In contrast, the
expectation cost of filing and prosecuting an AE application is about $4420
plus the cost of conducting the pre-examination search and preparing the AE
support document. If the cost of conducting the search and preparing the
support document exceeds $3500, then filing and prosecuting a Track 1
application should, on average, cost less than filing and prosecuting an AE
benefit of Track 1 for small entities may be even greater. At small entity
rates, the expectation cost of filing and prosecuting a Track 1 application is
only $5520. This means that Track 1 should be less expensive, on average, than
AE if the cost of the search and the support documents (which does not change
with entity size) is more than $1100 (the difference between the $5520 Track 1
expectation cost for small entities and the $4420 expectation cost for
prosecuting an AE application). According to the AIPLA 2011 Economic Survey, a
novelty search is about $2000, which suggests that Track 1 may be less
expensive on average than AE for small entities. For small
entities, a Track 1 application has a good chance of being cheaper to prosecute
than a regular application. Assuming 2.7 office actions on the normal track at
a cost to the applicant of $2600 per office action, the expectation cost of
prosecuting a normal application is $7020. Conversely, the expectation cost of
prosecuting a Track 1 application for a small entity is only $5520—including
the Track 1 petition fee. Of course, the
applicant should expect to incur all of the costs for a Track 1 application
within 12 months (or less) instead of over 2–3 years (or more) as would be the
case with a normal application.
Track 1 examination appears to be significantly faster on average than the
USPTO’s other programs for expediting examination. Surprisingly, prosecuting a
Track 1 application may cost less than prosecuting an AE application even
accounting for the large fee for participating in the Track 1 program.
The authors are attorneys at Foley & Lardner LLP. This article reflects
the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of Foley & Lardner LLP or its clients.
For comparison purposes, current Director Kappos recently quoted an average of
153 days to “final disposition” for Track 1 cases, with an allowance rate of
about 50%. The term “final disposition”,
of course, includes a variety of actions other than the allowances in our
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/03/total-patent-application-pendency.html
http://www.uspto.gov/ip/global/patents/PPH_slides_for_WS_RT_(2).ppt
The AIPLA 2011 Economic Survey gives response costs, in 2010, of $3000 for
relatively complex electrical, computer, biotech and chemical cases; $2500 for
relatively complex mechanical cases; and $1850 for minimally complex cases.
Posted on Dec 27, 2012 at 05:17 AM | Permalink
Countdown to March 16, 2013 by Dennis Crouch
New patent applications filed three months from now will fall under the US new First-to-File regime created by the America Invents Act of 2011. Those applications will no longer be able to claim invention-date priority, will have much more limited pre-filing grace period, will be subject to prior user rights and broad post-grant review, and can be invalidated by public uses and sales of similar inventions in foreign countries. On the other hand, absent a derivation problem, secret prior invention or reduction to practice by a third party will no longer be relevant to patentability. How are you preparing for this March 16, 2013 changeover? Posted on Dec 26, 2012 at 04:49 AM | Permalink
Posted on Dec 25, 2012 at 10:00 AM | Permalink
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Posted on Dec 25, 2012 at 04:13 AM | Permalink
. Oakley has again asserted its D. 397,350 that covers eyeglass fronts.
Lulumon has asserted its Design Patent No. D.645,644 against Calvin Klein. Klein immediately caved. Posted on Dec 23, 2012 at 09:08 PM | Permalink
TITLE II--PATENT LAW TREATY (PLT) IMPLEMENTATION
A draft mark-up and commentary can be downloaded here: http://www.patentlyo.com/PLT.pdf
Posted on Dec 21, 2012 at 11:55 AM | Permalink