Seeking Transparency in Waco

Patent

The following short statement was written by Prof. Bernard Chao (Denver) and then joined by 20+ additional professors whose names are listed below.  Chao was a patent attorney and patent litigator for 20 years before becoming a professor and I have long valued his insight. You'll note that I also signed below - DC. 

= = = [PDF Version] = = =

Judge Alan Albright’s court in the Western District of Texas is rapidly becoming the latest hot spot for patent litigation. While only a total of two patent cases were filed in 2016 and 2017 in Judge Albright’s Waco federal courthouse, the number of patent filings rose to seven hundred and ninety-three (793) in 2020.  See J. Jonas Anderson & Paul R. Gugliuzza, Federal Judge Seeks Patent Cases, (forthcoming Duke L. J 2021). Professors Anderson and Gugliuzza provide a thorough explanation (and critique) of this sudden ascent. I have a smaller, but nonetheless important, point to make. If the Western District of Texas is going to hear some of patent law’s most important cases, it should not do so in secret. Unfortunately, that appears to have just what happened in one the highest dollar value patent trials in recent history.

The patent world has been abuzz about the $2.18 billion verdict that the Waco jury handed down on March 2, 2021 in VLSI Technology v. Intel. The public debate in patent law has often focused on whether courts and juries are getting patent damages right. Looking at relevant filings on damages provides critical information for this important discussion. In high stakes cases, parties typically file summary judgment motions on damages and Daubert motions attempting to exclude certain theories. These motions often attach expert reports and deposition testimony as exhibits. Together these documents illustrate how patent doctrine shapes damage awards. For example, filings often explain how the parties seek to apportion damages between the value of the infringing features and the product as a whole. This is not an easy task and parties have taken many approaches to apportionment with varying levels of success.

However, these documents cannot be retrieved from the VLSI Technology v. Intel docket. To be clear, sealing is appropriate in some instances. Companies should be able to keep their confidential technical and financial information under wraps. But at least as of March 15, 2021, the following docket entries were wholly unavailable (i.e. not even redacted copies were available).

Docket No. Date Title (some abbreviated)
252 10/8/2020 DEFENDANT INTEL CORPORATIONS SEALED MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT OF NO PRE-SUIT INDIRECT INFRINGEMENT OR WILLFULNESS AND OF NO POSTSUITWILLFULNESS OR ENHANCED DAMAGES
258 10/08/2020 DEFENDANT INTEL CORPORATION'S SEALED MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT OF NO PRE-COMPLAINT DAMAGES UNDER 35 U.S.C. § 287.
260 10/08/2020 DEFENDANT INTEL CORPORATION'S SEALED MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT OF NO INFRINGEMENT AND/OR NO DAMAGES FOR CLAIMS 1, 2, 4, 17, 19, AND 20 OF U.S. PATENT NO. 7,793,025.
276 10/08/2020 VLSI'S DAUBERT SEALED MOTIONS TO EXCLUDE DAMAGES-RELATED TESTIMONY OF DEFENDANT INTEL'S EXPERTS
431 2/18/2021 Sealed Document filed: Defendant's Response to Plaintiff's Daubert Motions to EXCLUDE DAMAGES-RELATED TESTIMONY OF INTELS EXPERTS
443 2/18/2021 Sealed Document filed: VLSI'S OPPOSITION TO INTEL'S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT OF NO PRE-COMPLAINT DAMAGES UNDER 35 U.S.C. §§ 287 258
445 2/18/2021 Sealed Document filed: VLSI'S OPPOSITION TO INTEL'S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT OF NO INFRINGEMENT AND/OR NO DAMAGES FOR CLAIMS 1, 2, 4, 17, 19, AND 20 OF U.S. PATENT NO. 7,793,025 260
446 2/18/2021 Sealed Document filed: VLSI'S OPPOSITION TO INTEL'S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT OF NO PRE-SUIT INDIRECT INFRINGEMENT OR WILLFULNESS AND OF NO POST-SUIT WILLFULNESS OR ENHANCED DAMAGES 252

Two short orders granted motions to seal these filings. However, the sealed filings appear to go far beyond damages. The first order (dated October 8, 2020) granted roughly thirty motions (Docket Entries 214-244) and the second order (dated February 18, 2021) granted even more (Docket Entries 287-89, 293-319, 321-345, 374-381, 398, 404, 405, 410, 416. 418, 420, 424, 425). Many of the sealed motions are motions in limine that do not have a descriptive title.  They are simply numbered (e.g. Motion In Limine #3).  So, there is no way to even know what subjects they cover.

Judge Albright did give a small nod to transparency in his February 18, 2021 order which required “[t]he filing party shall file a publicly available, redacted version of any motion or pleading filed under seal within seven days.” Unfortunately, the redacted versions do not appear to have been filed.  A few days earlier, Judge Albright also issued a February 12, 2021, standing order that requires parties to do the same in all cases pending in his court.

But these orders are inadequate in several ways. First, they explicitly permit parties to file purportedly confidential information under seal without a motion. But the parties have no incentive to be transparent. It is the court’s job to protect the public interest, and this order abdicates that duty.  Second, there also appears to be no safeguard for parties that redact too much information in their filings, a problem we have seen before. See In re Violation of Rule 28(D) (Fed Cir. 2011)(sanctions for redacting information that was not confidential including case citations).  Third, the order does not require parties to redact exhibits. But some of the most critical information like deposition testimony and expert reports are exhibits. Finally, the order is not retroactive allowing most of the VLSI v. Intel case to remain in the dark.

This is not the first time that patent litigation has suffered from transparency problems. Other district courts have allowed too many documents to be sealed in previous high stakes cases like Broadcom v. Qualcomm (S.D. CA) and Monsanto v. Dupont (E.D. MO).  See, Bernard Chao, Not so Confidential: A Call for Restraint in Sealing Court Records, 2011 Patently-O Patent L.J. 6 & Bernard Chao & Derigan Silver, A Case Study in Patent Litigation Transparency, 2014 Journal of Dispute Resolution 83.

While these stories appear to paint a bleak picture for transparency in patent litigation, some courts are making an effort to keep their dockets accessible to the public. There have been notable decisions to ensure that filings are accessible. For example, in 2016 the Electronic Fronter Foundation successfully intervened and obtained an order from the E.D. of Texas to unseal records in a patent case, Blue Spike LLC, v Audible Magic Corp.  Earlier this month, the Federal Circuit, affirmed a lower decision rejecting attempts to seal specific filings in another patent dispute. See DePuy Synthes Products Inc. v. Veterinary Orthopedic Implants (Fed. Cir. Mar. 12 2021).

Moreover, individual court rules are now requiring greater transparency. The Federal Circuit’s latest rules clearly seek to maximize public disclosure. In each filing, Rule 25.1(d) only allows parties to mark “up to fifteen (15) unique words (including numbers)” as confidential.  A party seeking to exceed that limit must file a motion. As Silicon Valley’s home venue, the Northern District of California entertains numerous patent cases.  The court’s local rules say that material may only be sealed when a request “establishes that the the document, or portions thereof,  are privileged, protectable as a trade secret or otherwise entitled to protection under the law.”  Moreover, the request must “must be narrowly tailored to seek sealing only of sealable material.”  Ironically, even Texas state courts, which obviously do not hear patent cases, treat requests to seal far more seriously than the W.D. of Texas.  Specifically, Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 76a states that court records are “presumed to be open to the general public”, and only allows records to be sealed upon a showing that “a specific, serious and substantial interest which clearly outweighs” various interests in openness.

In short, the Western District of Texas should join these other courts and take its duty to ensure transparency seriously. As the Fifth Circuit recently put it , “[w]hen it comes to protecting the right of access, the judge is the public interest’s principal champion.” Binh Hoa Le v. Exeter Finance Corp. (5th Cir. Mar. 5, 2021). Accordingly, we make a few basic recommendations.  First, parties should not be able to file material under seal without judicial scrutiny. They should be required to file motions and justify their requests. Of course, a court also cannot rubber stamp these requests. If resources are a problem, the court can appoint a special master in larger cases. Second, parties should have to redact exhibits too. There can be valuable non-confidential information in those exhibits. Finally, a quick aside, even though judges bear the primary responsibility for making their dockets transparent, that does not mean the parties should not show more restraint. To the extent that either side is a repeat player, and thinks the patent system needs reform, they should be careful not to over seal. Their filings might end up being important contributions to the public debate.

Signatories

To continue reading, become a Patently-O member. Already a member? Simply log in to access the full post.

Patent Claims as Elements rather than Boundaries

Patent

By Jason Rantanen

I teach Introduction to Intellectual Property Law every spring semester, an experience that often causes me to reflect on some of the fundamental premises of intellectual property law in a way that advanced courses don’t necessarily always invite.  When you’re deep in the nuances of the effective date provision for post-AIA § 102, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the big questions.  This post is one of a few half-baked ideas from that return-to-basics reflection.

***

I grew up steeped in the world of property law.  My father’s law office was in rural New York, and his core practice involved representing farmers, villages, and small businesses on land transactions, estate planning, and probate matters.  Some of my first memories are of photocopying property abstracts: voluminous documents that contained the transaction history for a property, often going back a hundred years or more.  We’d copy these abstracts and then affix the new deed or mortgage associated with the transaction.  Later, I learned to type up property descriptions for deeds, writing out the metes and bounds of the land being transferred.  These descriptions  used points and lines to articulate the land for which the property rights applied.

For me, the language of patent claims as boundaries resonated early and easily.  After all, patent cases routinely refer to claims in boundary-like terms.  One example is the likening of claims to “metes and bounds,” as Judge Rich did in footnote 5 of In re Vamco Machine and Tool, Inc., 752 F.2d 1564, 1577 (Fed. Cir. 1985).

The function of claims is (a) to point out what the invention is in such a way as to distinguish it from what was previously known, i.e., from the prior art; and (b) to define the scope of protection afforded by the patent. In both of those aspects, claims are not technical descriptions of the disclosed inventions but are legal documents like the descriptions of lands by metes and bounds in a deed which define the area conveyed but do not describe the land.

Another example is this passage from Judge Michel’s opinion  in Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. v. M-I LLC, 514 F.3d 1244, 1249 (Fed. Cir. 2008):

Because claims delineate the patentee’s right to exclude, the patent statute requires that the scope of the claims be sufficiently definite to inform the public of the bounds of the protected invention, i.e., what subject matter is covered by the exclusive rights of the patent. Otherwise, competitors cannot avoid infringement, defeating the public notice function of patent claims.

Patent law scholarship, too, treats patent claims as if they are boundary-setting.  Books and articles refer to modern claiming practice as “peripheral claiming”– language that implies an area that is within and that which is without.  Even those scholars who have critiqued the idea of peripheral claiming nonetheless visualize patent claims as defining an area: signposts instead of fenceposts.  The idea is still that there is a zone set by the patent claim.

And yet, the more I’ve litigated, studied, and taught about patents, the more I’ve realized that conceptualizing patent claims as defining an area is fundamentally wrong.  Patent claims are not boundaries, and it’s confusing to those who are trying to grasp patent law when we talk about them that way.  There is no area that is “encompassed” within patent claims.  Patent claims don’t define a “boundary.”  And they are quite unlike the metes and bounds of a deed description.  Even if one could plot the components of a patent claim in some n-dimensional space, it would still not define a closed form.  Conceptualizing patent claims as if they define some “area” of technology isn’t how they actually work. One cannot draw a line from one claim element to another, except in the sense that claim elements can interrelate with one another–but that, too, is really just another element, albeit one that is implicit from the semantic structure of the claim rather than explicit in its words.

So how should patent claims be conceptualized, if not as establishing a boundary?  My first answer goes back to how litigants and courts often actually approach them: as discrete legal elements akin to the elements of any other legal claim.  The limitations in patent claims aren’t like the boundaries defined in a deed; instead, they are like the elements of a tort.  Each of these elements must be met in order for the claim to be infringed, invalidated, or adequately supported by the disclosure.

Consider, for example, patent law’s novelty requirement.  In order for a prior art reference to anticipate a patent claim, each and every element of the claim must be present in the prior art reference.  Or the analysis for infringement: for there to be infringement, each and every element of the claim must be present in the accused product or process, either literally or as an equivalent.  In both cases, patent claims are treated as if they are a series of elements–not as boundary lines that are crossed or not.  They are, in the words of Nolo’s Plain-English Law Dictionary, “the component parts of a legal claim.”

In the end, despite my initial attraction to the language of real property to describe patent claims, I’ve come to realize that this rhetorical device–enshrined in patent law judicial opinions and used in briefs and legal scholarship–is both misleading and wrong.  Patent claims are not boundaries, and we should stop referring to them that way.  Instead, they are elements in their legal sense: sets of individual legal requirements that must each be proven to achieve a particular legal status.

Perhaps this is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said.  And yet, for those who are learning patent law for the first time, it is hardly obvious – particularly when the opinions that we read talk about patent claims in boundary-like terms.

***

Thoughtful, non-repetitive comments welcome.  Comments that I think are crud or junk, in my subjective opinion, will be deleted without further notice or comment.