A patent application was properly denied on the basis that it covered the abstract idea of rules for playing a wagering game and used conventional steps of shuffling and dealing a standard deck of cards, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (In re Ray Smith and Amanda Tears Smith, March…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed an appeal of a district court’s motions to compel arbitration and stay proceedings (Let’s Go Aero, Inc. v. Cequent Performance Products, Inc., March 3, 2016, Taranto, R.). A ruling on arbitrability would be advisory as to the district court’s order. A full summary of this…
Factual findings did not support a district court’s conclusion that a former analyst for two financial services companies intended to cause a loss of $12 million when he unlawfully copied proprietary computer files and used the data to conduct computerized stock market trades for himself. A 36-month prison sentence based on the erroneous intended loss…
Infringement claims against cell phone carrier T-Mobile and its vendors, Nokia and Ericsson, concerning four patents for cell phone infrastructure equipment were properly barred by the doctrine of patent exhaustion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The lower court’s order granting the defendants’ motion for summary judgment was therefore affirmed…
A non-disclosure agreement in an employment contract between a medical device maker and a former employee was not an unenforceable non-compete agreement under Texas law, theU.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has decided in a not-for-publication opinion. The district court erroneously concluded that the non-disclosure provision formed a “lifetime non-compete clause” in violation of Texas…
Medical device manufacturer TriReme Medical, LLC had standing to pursue a claim to correct the inventorship of three patents owned by competitor AngioScore, Inc., based on an assignment from a physician who allegedly contributed to the development of the angioplasty balloon catheter claimed in the patents, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit…
In finding that all of the claims of Cutsforth’s U.S. Patent No. 7,990,018 (“the ’018 patent”) were obvious in light of the prior art, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board erred in failing to explain its reasoning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has decided (Cutsforth, Inc. v. MotivePower, Inc., January 22,…
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board did not err in affirming the rejection of several claims of a patent application directed to a method of enzymatic hydrolysis of soy fiber suitable as a food additive on the ground of obviousness, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has determined (In re Urbanski, January…
In a patent infringement suit that Unwired Planet brought against Apple and Research in Motion—for the infringement of three patents on a data communications network that included communications between a mobile device and a network server—a federal district court properly construed the claim term “mobile device” as “a portable wireless two-way communication device that does…
In awarding plaintiff Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (“CSIRO”) $16,243,067 in damages for Cisco Systems’ (“Cisco’s”) infringement of CSIRO’s U.S. Patent No. 5,487,069 (“’069 patent”), the federal district court in Tyler, Texas, erred by not accounting for the ’069 patent’s standard-essential status and in its reasoning for discounting a relevant license agreement, the U.S….
