Patent Law

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By Pamela Winston Bertani

Suppose your client discovers that a patent application pending before the United States Patent and Trademark Office discloses information or includes claims that infringe your client’s existing United States patent – and your client wants to know what can be done to challenge the pending application without actually filing a patent infringement suit. Your answer should be that there are several options for challenging a patent or patent application before the Patent and Trademark Office, instead of in court. This article briefly reviews the alternatives your client should be aware of.
Continue Reading Challenging Patents – Short of Litigation

By Scott Cameron

In baseball, “taking one for the team” means you lean out over the plate and let the pitch hit you, earning a free trip to first base. To a guy out with his friends, it has an entirely different meaning. For Canadian company Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry wireless email device, it means writing a $612.5 million check for a lifetime, perpetual license to use an invalid patent. That’s a hard fastball to have to “take for the team.”
Continue Reading BlackBerries Are In Season Again – And It’s A $612.5 Million Season

Competent advice of counsel is strong evidence to ward off a finding of willfulness. However, incompetent advice of counsel may be worse than no advice at all. Knorr-Bremse stands for the proposition that an accused’s failure to obtain an infringement opinion or its exercise of the attorney-client privilege concerning that opinion may not be used as an adverse inference of willful infringement. But an incompetent infringement opinion, if the privilege is waived, may be offered by the plaintiff as prima facie evidence as willful disregard of the patent holder’s rights…
Continue Reading Incompetent Legal Advice: Evidence of Willful Infringement

By Dale Campbell

Last week the United States Supreme Court denied the petition filed by the maker of the Blackberry seeking to overturn adverse rulings that the popular hand held email device violated patents owned by NTP, Inc., an East Coast based intellectual property holding company. The Supreme Court’s denial puts the Blackberry one step closer to enforcement of an issued permanent injunction.
Continue Reading Will Your Blackberry Go Dark?

By Audrey Millemann

Amazon.com was recently in the news again. This time, it is defending its “1-click system” from accusations of patent infringement. The issue before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals was one of first impression: whether a single patent claim could cover both a system and a method. The answer, according to the court, is no.
Continue Reading In the Patent World, One Claim Equals One Class