February 2012 Archives

Hynix Semiconductor Inc. won’t be arguing to the Supreme Court why frequent Federal Circuit Court of Appeals litigant Rambus should be barred enforcing certain patents. This week, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case between the two companies.

Rambus, which describes itself as “one of the world’s premier technology licensing companies,” has been mired in patent litigation with Hynix since the ’90s. Hynix had asked the Court to consider whether Rambus had illegally sued for patent infringement, reports Reuters.

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of search engine giants Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google in a patent infringement case over paid search advertisements. The order, which was released on Monday, did not elaborate why the three-judge panel upheld the lower court's ruling, however.

The patent infringement suit began in 2007 when Ohio-based company Paid Search Engine Tools sued Yahoo! over its alleged infringement of its "paid search engine bid management" patent. The patent describes a method "for overcoming deficiencies and inefficiencies in the current paid search engine keyword bidding market, by providing keyword bidders with information they need to better optimize their use of paid search engines."

The company later added Microsoft and Google to its list of alleged infringers in 2008, and the cases were consolidated in 2009.

The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals may have drawn “the final curtain” over the decades-long patent war between W.L. Gore & Associates and C.R. Bard Inc. and upheld one of the largest patent awards it has ever affirmed.

In a 2-1 decision on Friday, the Federal Circuit affirmed a $186 million jury verdict and post-trial rulings that doubled the verdict against Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, which was accused of willfully infringing a Bard patent on vascular stents. The $371.2 million award reportedly exceeds Bard’s total reported net income of $328 million in 2011.

Here at FindLaw, we understand the pressures of being a legal professional - most of us are recovering lawyers - so we want to help by tossing you that preferred life preserver of the legal profession, the short list.

We’ve been writing quite a few stories about the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upholding or staying preliminary injunctions, typically against drug companies who are trying to sell generic versions of popular drugs. But how does one typically go through the process of challenging a preliminary injunction in the Federal Circuit? Luckily, Patently-O provides some insight into the process:

In what some of have called the case of the “most-litigated email message in American jurisprudence,” the score is now Google Inc.: 0, Oracle, Corp.: 7.

Google lost another attempt to exclude a potentially-damning email written by one of its engineers as it fights a Java patent infringement lawsuit filed by Oracle.

Setbacks abound for Momenta Pharmaceuticals Inc. after the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals stayed an injunction, pending appeal, against rival Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc. and its partner Amphastar Pharmaceuticals.

Amphastar is seeking to sell a generic version of blood-thinner Lovenox, which Momenta owns two patents to. A federal judge ordered an injunction on the sale of the generic drug in October. However, with the Federal Circuit’s decision to stay the injunction, Watson and Amphastar made plans to sell the generic drug immediately, according to Bloomberg.