Justia Intellectual Property Opinion Summaries

Hyosung and Diebold manufacture and sell ATMs. Diebold filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission claiming that Hyosung’s imported ATMs infringe its 616 and 631 patents and their importation violates 19 U.S.C. 1337(a)(1)(B). The 616 patent claims an ATM rollout tray that allows for easier servicing of its internal components. The 631 patent relates to a particular method for reading magnetic ink character recognition data on checks (e.g., ink used for the account and routing numbers) that are inserted into an ATM regardless of their width or orientation. The ITC concluded that Hyosung’s accused products infringed both patents; that the asserted claims were not invalid; and that the domestic industry requirement was met for both patents; it entered a limited exclusion order and cease and desist orders against Hyosung. Hyosung redesigned its products to avoid infringing the 616 patent and sought an administrative ruling by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Customs concluded that the newly redesigned products did not infringe and were therefore not covered by the ITC’s limited exclusion order. The Federal Circuit affirmed as to the 631 patent and concluded that the appeal was moot as to the 616 patent, which has expired, so the ITC’s orders as to that patent have no prospective effect. View "Hyosung TNS Inc. v. International Trade Commission" on Justia Law

Flow Valve’s patent, entitled “Workpiece Supporting Assembly,” is a reissue of the 213 patent. During reissue prosecution, Flow added claims 14-20 but made no changes to the written description or drawings of the original 213 patent. The Reissue patent relates to supporting assemblies--fixtures, for holding workpieces during machining. Forum sought a declaration of invalidity of the Reissue patent, arguing that the added reissue claims did not comply with the original patent requirement under 35 U.S.C. 251 and improperly broadened the original patent claims by omitting the arbor limitations. Flow argued that a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand that the patent disclosed multiple inventions, consisting of embodiments with and without arbors and supported its argument with an expert declaration from an experienced machinist. The Federal Circuit summary judgment in favor of Forum. The original patent does not disclose the invention claimed in the reissue patent. The reissue claims, therefore, do not comply with the original patent requirement as a matter of law. The few references in the written description to machining, in general, do not refer to or disclose specific embodiments, and the boilerplate language that modifications can be made to the original disclosed invention does not even suggest an arbor-less embodiment of the disclosed invention. View "Forum US, Inc. v. Flow Valve, LLC" on Justia Law

University of Minnesota (UMN), an arm of the state of Minnesota, pursues patent protection for inventions resulting from its research and is the owner of the patents at issue. LSI designs and supplies semiconductors; it allegedly infringed UMN’s 601 patent, which claims particular types of “read channel” chips. Ericsson, a telecommunications company. Its customers’ use of Ericsson’s products was alleged to infringe four UMN patents that claim technology used for 4G LTE networks. UMN sued LSI and separately sued Ericsson’s customers. Ericsson intervened in the customer suits. After the commencement of the infringement suits, LSI and Ericsson separately petitioned the Patent Trial and Appeal Board for inter partes review, seeking a determination of unpatentability of the challenged claims on grounds of anticipation and obviousness. The Board declined to dismiss the petitions, rejecting an argument that states enjoy sovereign immunity in IPR proceedings. The Federal Circuit affirmed. IPR represents the sovereign’s reconsideration of the initial patent grant, and the differences between state and tribal sovereign immunity do not warrant a different result than in circuit precedent concerning tribal sovereign immunity: State sovereign immunity does not apply to IPR proceedings. View "Regents of the University of Minnesota. v. LSI Corp." on Justia Law

ON Semiconductor sought inter partes review (IPR) of several claims of Power’s 079 patent. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board determined that the IPR was not time-barred by 35 U.S.C. 315(b) and that the challenged claims were invalid. The Federal Circuit vacated. Power raised the same section 315(b) argument that it raised and litigated in a non-appealed IPR on a different patent, so ON established the basic requirements for issue preclusion. However, the lack-of-incentive-to-litigate exception applies and justifies rejecting ON’s issue preclusion argument. On the merits, the court concluded that section 315(b) requires consideration of privity and real-party-in-interest (RPI) relationships arising after filing but before institution. The court declined to construe section 315(b) in a way that would have the Board, when deciding whether to institute, ignore the existence of RPIs or privies who would benefit from having an IPR instituted simply because they were not RPIs or privies when the petition was filed. IPR was time-barred by because Fairchild, which challenged the patent in 2009 and merged with ON several years later, was an RPI at the time the IPR was instituted, even though it was not an RPI at the time the petition was filed. View "Power Integrations, Inc. v. Semiconductor Components Industries, LLC" on Justia Law

Bodum produces and sells what design magazines and art museums have recognized as an iconically designed houseware product—the Chambord French press coffee maker. Bodum sued Top for selling a French press that Bodum claimed infringes on its unregistered trade dress in the Chambord, 15 U.S.C. 1125(a)(1)(A). The court excluded evidence of various utility patents covering French press coffee makers and rejected Top’s argument that Bodum failed to prove the Chambord design was nonfunctional. A jury awarded Bodum $2 million in damages. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. Bodum presented sufficient evidence for the jury to have found Bodum’s claimed trade dress was non‐functional. The district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding evidence of utility patents that do not claim any of the features that comprise the claimed Chambord trade dress. View "Bodum USA, Inc. v. A Top New Casting Inc." on Justia Law

Elm owns the Challenged Patents, which share a specification and all relate to “stacked integrated circuit memory.” The Challenged Patents are the subject of co-pending litigation between Elm and Petitioners. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board instituted inter partes review and held that Petitioners did not establish the unpatentability of 105 claims across 11 patents. The Federal Circuit affirmed. Each challenged claim requires a low-tensile-stress dielectric, and substantial evidence supports the Board’s finding that a person of ordinary skill in the art would not have reasonably expected success in combining the prior art to meet this limitation. The court construed the term “substantially flexible” as largely able to bend without breaking and contains a circuit layer that is substantially flexible semiconductor substrate and a sufficiently low tensile stress dielectric material. View "Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. v. Elm 3DS Innovations, LLC" on Justia Law

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has, on a few occasions, found that “capsule” was “merely descriptive” of cellphone cases, a finding that precludes registration on the Principal Register. The Office has also found otherwise and allowed Uncommon to register “capsule.” Rival case manufacturers still use the term. Uncommon sued Spigen for trademark infringement and unfair competition, 15 U.S.C. 1114, 1125(a). Spigen sought cancellation of the mark. In discovery, Spigen produced a survey to prove that consumers did not associate “capsule” with Uncommon’s cases, and disclosed the person who conducted the survey as a “non-testifying expert,” but without foundational expert testimony to explain the survey’s methodology, it was inadmissible, FRCP 26(a). The district court excused Spigen’s error and granted Spigen summary judgment on the merits. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. Spigen’s disclosure was inaccurate but harmless. Spigen carried its burden to defeat Uncommon’s presumption of inherent distinctiveness. Spigen demonstrated that there is no issue of material fact regarding the descriptiveness of the “capsule” mark. With the survey, there was no genuine issue of material fact as to the mark’s invalid registration. Nor was there an issue of fact regarding the unlikelihood of consumer confusion. View "Uncommon, LLC v. Spigen, Inc." on Justia Law

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011 created the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, 35 U.S.C. 6(c), which conducts administrative review proceedings that enable a “person” to challenge the validity of a patent post-issuance: “inter partes review,” “post-grant review,” and “covered-business-method review” (CBM review). The Board either confirms or cancels the patent claims. Any dissatisfied party may then seek judicial review in the Federal Circuit. A patent can also be reexamined either in federal court during a defense to an infringement suit or in an ex parte reexamination by the Patent Office.USPS introduced an enhanced service to process undeliverable mail, which Return Mail asserted infringed its patent. USPS petitioned for ex parte reexamination. The Patent Office confirmed the patent’s validity. Return Mail then sued, seeking compensation for the unauthorized use of its invention. USPS petitioned for CBM review. The Patent Board concluded that the subject matter of Return Mail’s claims was ineligible to be patented. The Federal Circuit affirmed.The Supreme Court reversed. The government is not a “person” capable of instituting AIA review proceedings. Absent an express definition of “person” in the patent statutes, the Court applied a longstanding interpretive presumption that "person" does not include the sovereign, citing common usage, and the Dictionary Act. There are many references to “person[s]” in the Patent Act and the AIA: Sometimes “person” plainly includes or excludes the government, but sometimes it might be read either way. The mere existence of some government-inclusive references and the government's ability to obtain a patent do not overcome the presumption that the government is not a “person” eligible to petition for AIA review. Congress may have had good reason to authorize the government to initiate a hands-off ex parte reexamination but not to become a party to the AIA’s full-blown adversarial proceeding. View "Return Mail, Inc. v. United States Postal Service" on Justia Law

The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment and award of attorney's fees to Sanctuary Clothing in an action brought by Fiesta, alleging that Sanctuary clothing copied its fabric design. The panel held that the district court did not err in finding that the design had been published prior to registration and therefore Fiesta's registration application contained an inaccuracy. Furthermore, Fiesta included inaccurate information on its application with knowledge that it was inaccurate. Therefore, the inaccuracy in the registration rendered it invalid as to the design under section 411(b)(1)(B) of the Copyright Act. The panel also held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in awarding attorney's fees to Sanctuary Clothing. View "Gold Value International Textile, Inc. v. Sanctuary Clothing, LLC" on Justia Law

The asserted patents were originally assigned to AMD, which later purported to transfer “all right, title and interest” in the patents to Lone Star, with several limitations. For example, Lone Star agreed to only assert the covered patents against “Unlicensed Third Party Entit[ies]” specifically listed in the agreement. New entities can only be added if both parties agree to add them. If Lone Star sues an unlisted entity, AMD has the right, without Lone Star’s approval, to sublicense the covered patents to the unlisted target. AMD can prevent Lone Star from assigning the patents or allowing them to enter the public domain. AMD and its customers can continue to practice the patents; AMD shares in any revenue Lone Star generates from the patents through “monetization efforts." Lone Star sued parties listed as Unlicensed Third Party Entities in the agreement, asserting infringement and alleging that AMD transferred “all right, title, and interest” in the asserted patents to Lone Star. The district court concluded that Lone Star does not own the patents and could not assert them. The Federal Circuit vacated the dismissal, while agreeing that Lone Star cannot assert the patents on its own. The court should not have dismissed the case without considering whether AMD should have been joined (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 19. View "Lone Star Silicon Innovations, LLC v. Nanya Technology Corp." on Justia Law