Tag Archives: Damages

Federal Circuit to Review Defense of Laches in Patent Law

Patent,

By Jason Rantanen

This morning, the Federal Circuit issued an Order granting en banc review in SCA Hygiene Prods. Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Prods., LLC.  (Dennis’s  commentary on SCA here: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/09/federal-supreme-holding.html.) The central issue involves the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (holding that laches does not apply to copyright infringement occurring within the window provided by the statute of limitations) on patent law.

The issues presented:

(a) In light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 134 S. Ct. 1962 (2014) (and considering any relevant differences between copyright and patent law), should this court’s en banc decision in A.C. Aukerman Co. v. R.L. Chaides Constr. Co., 960 F.2d 1020 (Fed. Cir. 1992), be overruled so that the defense of laches is not applicable to bar a claim for damages based on patent infringement occurring within the six-year damages limitations period established by 35 U.S.C. § 286?

(b) In light of the fact that there is no statute of limitations for claims of patent infringement and in view of Supreme Court precedent, should the defense of laches be available under some circumstances to bar an entire infringement suit for either damages or injunctive relief? See, e.g., Lane & Bodley Co. v. Locke, 150 U.S. 193 (1893).

The order is not yet available on the Federal Circuit’s website, but can be read here: Download SCA en banc order. Thanks to Hal Wegner for bringing it to my attention.

No Willful Infringement Since Infringer’s Litigation Arguments were “Not Without Reason”

Patent, ,

by Dennis Crouch

Sryker v. Zimmer (Fed. Cir. 2014)

In 2010, Stryker sued its competitor Zimmer for infringing three patents covering pulsed lavage devices used for wound cleaning.  U.S. Patent Nos. 6,022,329, 6,179,807, and 7,144,383. A jury sided with the patentee awarded $70 million in lost profits and also found that the infringement willful.  Taking that verdict, the district court then awarded treble damages for willfulness, attorney fees based upon the exceptional case, and a permanent injunction against Zimmer.   On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed the underlying damage award, but reversed the district court’s judgment that the infringement was willful — finding that the noninfringement and invalidity defenses raised by Zimmer were “not unreasonable.”

Treble Clef

Treble Damages: The Patent Act sets up a two-step process for determining patent infringement damages.  First, the court must award “damages adequate to compensate for the infringement” that are at least “a reasonable royalty.” 35 U.S.C. 284.  Next, “the court may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed.”  Id.  To add some mystique to the system, we term this ‘treble damages’ rather than ‘triple damages’ or – as the statute suggests – ‘three times.’

The statute itself offers no further limitations or guidance as to when triple damages are appropriate, only that a court “may increase the damages.”

Seagate vs the Statute: Despite the broad discretion seemingly offered by the statute, the Federal Circuit has held that increased damages are only available when a defendant is guilty of its complex willful infringement schema that requires clear and convincing evidence that (1) an adjudged infringer took its wrongful actions “despite an objectively high likelihood that its actions constituted infringement of a valid patent” and (2) that the objectively-defined risk was subjectively known (or should have been known) to the infringer.  In re Seagate Tech., LLC, 497 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2007) (en banc).

Ex Post Reasonableness: Because willfuness includes the objective inquiry, it turns out that an infringer who made the intentional decision to infringe, believing fully that the act was infringement, and that was that later judged to be infringing can still avoid being stuck with enhanced damages with a later-concocted (but ultimately incorrect) argument that the patent is invalid or not infringed – so long as that argument is “susceptible to a reasonable conclusion.”   Uniloc USA, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 632 F.3d 1292 (Fed. Cir. 2011).

Although the jury decided the willfulness question in the Federal Circuit has held that insufficient under the Seagate test. Rather, a judge must determine at least the objective portion of the test (objectively reckless) and that determination is reviewed de novo on appeal. Bard Peripheral Vascular, Inc. v. W.L. Gore & Assocs., Inc., 682 F.3d 1003, 1007 (Fed. Cir. 2012).

Here, reviewing the lower court’s decision de novo, the Federal Circuit found that the defendant had offered a construction that was “not unreasonable” or at least “not without reason.”

 

Ericsson v D-Link: Standards, Patents, and Damages

Patent, ,

By Jason Rantanen

Ericsson, Inc. v. D-Link Systems, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2014) Download Ericsson v D-Link
Panel: O’Malley (author), Taranto (dissenting-in-part), Hughes

Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) are an integral part of the modern technological landscape.  As an example, Ericsson, the patent holder in this case, alleged that the patents at issue were essential to a common Wi-Fi standard, 802.11(n); thus all 802.11(n) compliant devices infringe the patents.  Due to their nature (they cover technologies whose widespread use can be as at least as much due to the adoption of the standard as the incremental value of the invention), SEPs pose particular issues when dealing with the question of remedies.

Two well-recognized problems are hold-up and royalty stacking.  “Patent hold-up exists when the holder of a SEP demands excessive royalties after companies are locked into using a standard. Royalty stacking can arise when a standard implicates numerous patents, perhaps hundreds, if not thousands. If companies are forced to pay royalties to all SEP holders, the royalties will “stack” on top of each other and may become excessive in the aggregate.”  Slip Op. at 7-8.  Organizations that develop standards, such as IEEE, typically address these potential problems by seeking pledges from their members “that they will grant licenses to an unrestricted number of applicants on “reasonable, and nondiscriminatory’ (‘RAND’) terms.”  Id. at 8.  Ericsson promised to offer such licenses for its 802.11(b) SEPs.

Background: In 2010, Ericsson filed an infringement suit against D-Link, accusing it of infringing a set of its 802.11(b) SEPs.  Ericsson prevailed at the district court, with a jury finding infringement of three patents, rejecting a validity challenge to one, and awarding Ericsson $10 million in damages (a royalty rate of $0.15 per product).  Based on the jury award, the judge found $0.15 per product to be an appropriate running royalty.  On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed enough of the district court findings as to liability for the issue to be one of damages.  (Judge Taranto dissented as to one of the infringement conclusions but agreed with the rest of the majority opinion).

Damages and SEPs: The below paragraph from the court’s opinion summarizes its key holdings on damages:

In sum, we hold that, in all cases, a district court must instruct the jury only on factors that are relevant to the specific case at issue. There is no Georgia-Pacific-like list of factors that district courts can parrot for every case involving RAND-encumbered patents. The court should instruct the jury on the actual RAND commitment at issue and must be cautious not to instruct the jury on any factors that are not relevant to the record developed at trial. We further hold that district courts must make clear to the jury that any royalty award must be based on the incremental value of the invention, not the value of the standard as a whole or any increased value the patented feature gains from its inclusion in the standard. We also conclude that, if an accused infringer wants an instruction on patent hold-up and royalty stacking, it must provide evidence on the record of patent hold-up and royalty stacking in relation to both the RAND commitment at issue and the specific technology referenced therein.

Slip Op. at 56.  The first sentence is probably the most widely applicable, and arguably applies beyond the RAND context.  It is legal error to simply recite the Georgia-Pacific factors in a set of jury instructions.  Courts must be cognizant of which factors actually apply in a given situation.  “Although we recognize the desire for bright line rules and the need for district courts to start somewhere, courts must consider the facts of record when instructing the jury and should avoid rote reference to any particular damages formula.”  Slip Op. at 50.

Of course, legal error in a jury instruction does not mandate reversal; that error must still be prejudicial.  Here, the errors were significant and in combination sufficiently prejudicial.  For example, some Georgia-Pacific factors are directly contrary to the RAND commitment, such as factor 4, “'[t]he licensor’s established policy and marketing program to maintain his patent monopoly by not licensing others to use the invention or by granting licenses under special conditions designed to preserve that monopoly.’ Georgia-Pacific, 318 F. Supp. at 1120. Because of Ericsson’s RAND commitment, however, it cannot have that kind of policy for maintaining a patent monopoly.”  Slip Op. at 48.

Another important piece of the court’s holding is its clarification of what the patent remedy must relate to in the context of SEPs: the “incremental value of the invention not the value of the standard as a whole or any increased value the patented feature gains from its inclusion in the standard.”  In other words, just as modern devices incorporate many different technological components, so too do standards include multiple technologies.  “Just as we apportion damages for a patent that covers a small part of a device, we must also apportion damages for SEPs that cover only a small part of a standard.”  Id. at 52.

Finally, on patent hold-up and royalty stacking, an accused infringer can obtain such an instruction but there must be record evidence: “The district court need not instruct the jury on hold-up or stacking unless the accused infringer presents
actual evidence of hold-up or stacking. Certainly something more than a general argument that these phenomena are possibilities is necessary.”  Id. at 54.

Two Upcoming Patent Law Symposia in D.C.

Patent

By Jason Rantanen

There are two terrific looking patent law symposia in D.C this month .

On Tuesday, November 11, the American University Washington College of Law and the University of Utah – S.J. Quinney College of Law will co-host a half-day symposium on The Future of Patent Remedies.  From the symposium website:

Over the past few years, the once-placid world of patent remedies has been thrown into upheaval.  Judicial decisions and pronouncements by enforcement agencies have both put pressure on traditional doctrines relating to damages, fee recovery and injunctive relief.  This symposium will explore recent developments and the future trajectory of patent remedies law from a judicial, regulatory and legislative standpoint.

Speakers include Tom Cotter (Minnesota), Suzanne Munck (FTC), Jim Sherwood (Google), and more.  More details here: http://www.pijip.org/events/patentpolicy-remedies/

On Friday, November 21, the George Washington University Law School and the Center for Intellectual Property Research at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law are co-hosting a symposium on design patents.  Speakers include Mark Janis (Indiana), Sarah Burstein (Oklahoma), Michael Risch (Villanova), John Cheek (Caterpillar), and many more.  Topics include remedies, functionality, prior art, and a town hall discussion on whether changes are needed in design patent law.  The program is at the GW School of Law.  More details here:  http://designlaw2014.com/

 

Patent Reform 2015: Republican Agenda

Patent, , , ,

by Dennis Crouch

Although the Washington DC politics of patent law is somewhat confusing, the divide on tort reform is much more clear and the pending patent reform legislation in Congress is largely tort reform (but with a focus on patents).  The Republican led House of Representatives passed the Goodlatte Innovation Act in 2013 (H.R.3309), but Democrats in the Senate have stymied the Bill’s progress despite support from the White House.  With Senate control now in Republican hands, I expect that a revised version of the Innovation Act will be able to pass through both houses of congress in 2015 and be signed by President Obama.

Meanwhile, changes in the patent system since 2013 have somewhat tempered demands for reform. Particularly the Supreme Court took strong pro-defendant positions in Alice Corp (patent eligibility), Nautilus (indefiniteness), and Octane Fitness (attorney fees) and, at the same time, the new post-issuance review proceedings have proven to be effective mechanisms for challenging patents in parallel to court actions. Further, it is likely that Supreme Court will raise pleading standards for patent cases (by eliminating Form 18) this calendar year as part of a larger reform of the rules of civil procedure. Likely as a result of  all of these factors, new infringement lawsuits are down as is the market-value of patents.  To be clear though, pro-reformers are still calling for reforms and this may be low-hanging fruit for Republican lawmakers.

H.R. 3309 as passed includes:

  • Substantially raising the pleading standards in patent cases – well above Iqbal and Twombly;
  • Creating presumption of fee shifting and ability to join ‘interested’ parties to pay fees when a losing-patentee is under-capitalized;
  • Severely limit pre-claim-construction discovery;
  • Partially limiting the availability of pre-suit demand letters for proving willfulness when seeking punitive (willfulness) damages;
  • Requiring transparancy of ownership;
  • Allowing for stays of customer-lawsuits in certain situations;
  • Narrowing the estoppel provision for Post-Grant Review filings; and
  • Codifying double patenting.

Indications are that President Obama’s administration and USPTO Director Nominee Michelle Lee support these changes (with some modification) — making this an area of early bipartisan cooperation in the new Congressional term.

Guest Post by Prof. Osborn: Infringement by Sales and Offers to Sell

Patent

A central focus of the Professor Lucas Osborn‘s research is infringement by offers to sell.  Below, he writes about this aspect of Halo v. Pulse.

Halo Electronics, Inc. v. Pulse Electronics, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2014) Halo v Pulse
Panel: Lourie (author), O’Malley (concurring opinion), Hughes (joining concurrence)

Jason wrote about the damages aspects of this case here, but the case also is interesting for its discussion of § 271(a). Halo accused Pulse of infringing patents covering surface mount electronic packages. At issue in the portion of the opinion was whether Pulse had either sold or offered to sell the devices “within the U.S.” under §271(a).

Sale

The accused infringer, Pulse, is a U.S. corporation who designs, manufactures, and sells the accused components. At a high level of generality, it sells components to Cisco. But it only does so indirectly through Cisco’s contract manufacturers, who are located outside the U.S.A. and who incorporate the components into end products overseas. Eventually, Cisco sells the completed products to consumers around the world. (The district court found that Pulse was liable as an inducer of infringement for any products that ultimately were imported into the U.S., and that decision was not part of the appeal).

Halo tried to establish that Pulse’s sales occurred “within the U.S.” as required by § 271(a), arguing that Pulse engaged in all the truly important sales activities in the U.S. From Halo’s perspective, Pulse reached the overall agreement for the sale of the components with Cisco in the U.S., such as by entering into a general agreement with Cisco about manufacturing guidelines, engaging in pricing negotiations in the U.S. with Cisco, approving prices that could be quoted to foreign buyers, meeting regularly with Cisco design engineers, sending product samples to Cisco for pre-approval, and attending sales meetings with its customers. Furthermore, according to Halo, Cisco masterminded the actions of its foreign contract manufacturers, such as by negotiating with its manufacturers the prices they could pay to their suppliers when purchasing component parts (such as from Pulse). Halo argued that these were the key activities that amounted to the sale of the accused components, and that everything else was mere window dressing.

But the Federal Circuit held that these actions did not constitute a sale “within the U.S.” because too many key events took place abroad. Following earlier decisions, the court looked at factors such as the places of contracting and performance to determine whether a sale occurred “within the U.S.” Here, the accused components were manufactured, shipped, and delivered abroad to foreign buyers. (This is not surprising, because if the products were manufactured in the U.S., it would constitute an infringing “making” under §271(a).) The court pointed out that Pulse’s agreement with Cisco was not a final contract for the sale of any specific products. Finally, the foreign component manufacturers, not Cisco, directed their purchase orders to Pulse’s non-U.S. offices and paid Pulse directly.

Concluding this part of its analysis, the court stated that “[a]ny doubt as to whether Pulse’s contracting activities in the United States constituted a sale within the United States under § 271(a) is resolved by the presumption against extraterritorial application of United States laws.” The court continued to emphasize the presumption against extraterritoriality when rejecting Halo’s argument that the sale occurred in the U.S. simply because Halo suffered harm there.

What remains unanswered is what minimum criteria must exist for a sale to occur “within” the U.S. In a footnote, the court stated that, “On these facts, we need not reach Halo’s argument that the place where a contract for sale is legally formed can itself be determinative as to whether a sale has occurred in the United States.” In earlier opinions, the Federal Circuit seemed to distance itself from this possibility. See Transocean Offshore Drilling, Inc. v. Maersk Contractors USA, Inc., 617 F.3d 1296, 1310 (Fed. Cir. 2010) (“[Defendant’s] first argument, that the location of negotiation and contracting should control is contrary to our precedent in [Litecubes LLC v. Northern Light Products, Inc., 523 F.3d 1353 (Fed. Cir. 2008)].”). This footnote in Halo suggests that this possibility is still in play.

Offer to Sell

Halo also argued that Pulse’s negotiations with Cisco amounted to infringing offers to sell within the U.S. The court disagreed. It held that no offer to sell “within the U.S.” occurred, relying on its decision in Transocean, which held that, “the location of the contemplated sale controls whether there is an offer to sell within the United States.” This case shows the Federal Circuit meant what it said in Transocean.

Transocean was the obverse of Halo: in Transocean, the court concluded that “an offer which is made in Norway by a U.S. company to a U.S. company to sell a product within the U.S., for delivery and use within the U.S. constitutes an offer to sell within the U.S. under § 271(a).” Here, any possible offer made by Pulse was not made abroad but was made in the U.S., and the delivery was not to the U.S. but abroad. Thus, this panel (comprised entirely of judges different from the Transocean panel) closed one possible exception to Transocean and confirmed that the location of the contemplated sale – and only the location – controls whether there is infringement for an offer to sell. The court justified this result by noting that otherwise, “the presumption against extraterritoriality would be breached.”

It is therefore clearer than ever that companies need not orchestrate trips abroad (or otherwise direct activities abroad) to ensure negotiations and offers to sell are extended outside the U.S. It is not where the words are uttered or the offer is made, but where the eventual sale will occur.

A high-level takeaway from this case is that for infringement by an “offer to sell,” the location of the prospective sale controls whether infringement is “within the U.S.,” while for infringement by “sale,” the court leaves open both the location of the prospective sale and the location of the contract formation activities as factors.

Sorting Out Sections 284 and 285

Patent, ,

By Jason Rantanen

Halo Electronics, Inc. v. Pulse Electronics, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2014) Halo v Pulse
Panel: Lourie (author), O’Malley (concurring opinion), Hughes (joining concurrence)

This opinions contains two important parts: a discussion of 271(a) in the context of multi-national transactions and Judge O’Malley’s concurrence on the issue of willful infringement.  I’ll write more about the 271(a) issue in a separate post, but for now I wanted to focus on the points Judge O’Malley raises.

In this case, Halo accused Pulse of willfully infringing its patent, thus paving the way for enhanced damages under 35 U.S.C. § 284.  That statute reads in relevant part:

When the damages are not found by a jury, the court shall assess them. In either event the court may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed. Increased damages under this paragraph shall not apply to provisional rights under section 154 (d).

The court may receive expert testimony as an aid to the determination of damages or of what royalty would be reasonable under the circumstances.

Under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, enhancement of damages under this provision requires either willful or bad-faith infringement.

In countering the infringement claim, Pulse argued that the asserted patent was obvious.  Ultimately, the jury rejected Pulse’s argument and found that the “it was highly probably that Pulse’s infringement was willful.”  Slip Op. at 7.  However, both the district judge and the Federal Circuit panel concluded that Pulse’s obviousness defense was not objectively unreasonable, thus precluding a finding of willfulness under In re Seagate‘s two-prong approach (which contains both objective and subjective components).

While concurring as to the panel outcome, Judge O’Malley (joined by Judge Hughes) wrote separately to issue a public call to “the full court to reevaluate our willfuness jurisprudence in light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Highmark and Octane Fitness.

Judge O’Malley’s concurrence first notes the linking of the standards for exceptional case and willful infringement.  Under Federal Circuit precedent, the test for willful infringement under § 284 parallels that for exceptional case determinations under § 285.  The court has stated this explicitly: “The objective baselessness standard for enhanced damages and attorney’s fees against a non-prevailing plaintiff under Brooks Furniture is identical to the objective recklessness standard for enhanced damages and attorneys’ fees against an accused infringer for § 284 willful infringement actions under [Seagate].”  iLOR, LLC v. Google, Inc., 631 F.3d 1372, 1377 (Fed. Cir. 2011).

This linkage leads Judge O’Malley to three observations:

1) Both the test for willful infringement and the test for exceptional case determinations were based on the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of Professional Real Estate Investors, Inc. v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 508 U.S. 49 (1993).  But, in Octane Fitness, the Supreme Court rejected the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of PRE in the exceptional case determination context.  If the two tests are truly in parallel, then the Federal Circuit should revisit the test for willful infringement.

2) The evidentiary standard for willful infringement should also be revisited. “In Octane Fitness, the Supreme Court also rejected the requirement that patent litigants establish their entitlement to attorneys’ fees under § 285 by ‘clear and convincing evidence’.  Id. at 1758.  As we used to do for attorneys’ fees, we currently require patentees to prove willfulness by clear and convincing evidence. See Seagate, 497 F.3d at 1371. As the Supreme Court explained in Octane Fitness, however, the ordinary rule in civil cases, and specifically patent infringement cases, is proof by a preponderance of the evidence.”  Concurrence at 4.

3) The Supreme Court also rejected a de novo standard of review for exceptional case determinations in Highmark.  This is important because, although Judge O’Malley doesn’t directly state it, the “objective” prong of willful infringement is currently treated as a question of law, meaning that it is reviewed under a de novo standard.  If the two standards are truly parallel, this is inconsistent with Highmark.

Finally, under both §§ 284 and 285, “the court” is the entity that makes the determination.  However, the Federal Circuit’s caselaw currently sends some issues of willful infringement to a jury.  In Judge O’Malley’s view, whether this is actually correct as a statutory matter should also be addressed by the court en banc.

***

I’m largely in agreement with Judge O’Malley.  Like the judge, I see a tremendous tension between the existing willful infringement caselaw and Octane Fitness/Highmark that flows from the treatment of §§ 284 and 285 as being in parallel.

I also think the history here is important – and my sense is that much of the mucky precedent in this area actually comes from the just the last decade.   One important piece of context to keep in mind is the totality of the circumstances analysis that comes after the threshold determination.  Attorney’s fees and enhanced damages are not a binary question, but rather a multi-step inquiry where the initial determination is just the first part.

What is the Particular ‘Value’ of FaceTime?: Thoughts Provoked by Discussion of VirnetX v. Cisco and Apple

Patent,

Guest Post by Jacob Jacoby, Merchants Council Professor of Consumer Behavior, New York University and President, JacobyIP Research (jj@jjri.com)

When claiming patent infringement due to an individual component of a multi-component product, patent attorneys confront a fundamental problem, namely, determining with a reasonable degree of precision the extent to which the patented feature creates the basis for customer demand.  The purpose of this post is to apprise patent attorneys of a research-based approach capable of doing so with precision, while being able to pass Daubert requirements.

Jason Rantanen’s September 16, 2014 post described the kind of evidence considered (and rejected) by the Federal Circuit in arriving at its VirnetX, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2014)  Virnetx v Cisco opinion.  As Jason pointed out:

A key issue in calculating the infringement damages for complex technological products is whether it is appropriate to use the value of the entire device in the damages calculation.  Generally speaking it is not appropriate to do so: “when claims are drawn to an individual component of a multi-component product, it is the exception, not the rule, that damages may be based upon the value of the multi-component product.”  Slip Op. at 27.  Rather, “‘[a] patentee may assess damages based on the entire market value of the accused product only where the patented feature creates the basis for customer demand or substantially creates the value of the component parts.’” Id., quoting Versata Software, Inc. v. SAP Am., Inc., 717 F.3d 1255, 1268 (Fed. Cir. 2013) (emphasis added by court).  This is due to the general requirement that damages must be actually attributable to the infringing features within a reasonable degree of precision.

The Federal Circuit rejected use of the Nash Bargaining Solution as a model for determining reasonable royalty damages.  This was not surprising, given that a key premise (namely, “where two person bargain over a matter, there is a ‘solution’…in which ‘each bargainer get[s] the same money profit”) could not possibly apply.  Customers purchasing smart phones, computers, TVs, etc. in the real-world marketplace typically are not “bargainers,” nor do they realize “the same money profit” from their purchases as do the sellers.

Subsequent discussion of Jason’s post yielded interesting perspective, especially the exchange between iwasthere and Curmudgeon.  When the former asked “So how would you propose breaking out the ‘value’ of FaceTime?…. What do you think [of] consumer survey data?”, the latter replied “Yes, I think customer surveys, akin to those used in trademark litigation, could make sense.”  As a proponent of surveys and author of the ABA’s 1000-plus page treatise, Trademark Surveys (2013), it might be surprising to see me assert: In my professional opinion, traditional survey research is not capable of providing a scientifically reliable and valid basis to be used when assessing damages. Consider some of the problems.

Suppose one asked past purchasers questions regarding the factors led them to make their purchase.  Considerable research shows that asking questions a point in time after the item has been purchased — especially for surveys conducted weeks, months or years after the purchase — is likely to generate answers subject to faulty memory.  Another problem is that the answers are likely to be colored by post-purchase experiences. Although a product feature may not have played a role in their pre-purchase deliberations and decision, positive post-purchase experiences can cause them to overestimate the value of the feature, to the point where they believe they must have considered it prior to purchase.  The reverse effect due to experiencing a disappointing feature is also possible.

Asking prospective purchasers to indicate the factors they think will influence their purchase decision can generate other problems.  Most importantly, prospective customers may not be aware of some product features until they begin seriously considering whether to purchase the product; hence, they could not possibly report on the materiality of these features to their purchase decision.

Consider iwasthere’s critical question “So how would you propose breaking out the ‘value’ of FaceTime?”  The answer is by using behavioral simulations such as those I developed and used for defendants in two matters, Polaroid Corporation v. Hewlett-Packard Company, U.S.D.C.  D. Delaware, C.A. No 06-738 (SLR) (2007) and John Taylor, et al. v. JVC Americas Corporation. U.S.D.C.  D. New Jersey, Civ. No. 2:07 Civ. 4059 (FSH/PS).  Such simulations measure actual information acquisition behavior not before or after the fact, but as it occurs, identifying the specific features potential purchasers of the goods at issue actually do consider and consider important (and those they ignore and obviously not consider important) while reaching a purchase decision.  In part based upon the research findings, both matters quickly settled out of court.  To illustrate, consider the following findings from one of the above mentioned cases which breaks out consumer demand for the contested feature, Feature P, as well as all the other features associated with this product. (Note: The names of the features have been redacted, which is why the features only have letters.)

RelativeImportanceEvidence

Many contemporary products have numerous features and components.  The Federal Circuit has called for evidence quantifying the extent to which allegedly infringing components or features drive customer demand.  The output from such simulations are capable of doing so better than are any other extant procedures, thereby making it easier for damages to be attributable to the infringing feature(s) within a reasonable degree of precision.  Moreover, given their realistic nature and clear-cut findings, such simulations are likely to be more readily understood and accepted by triers of fact, especially juries, than are intricate damages theories, especially those involving questionable premises or arcane mathematical formulas.

Unfortunately, we cannot go back in time to determine to determine how the parties would react to each other under a hypothetical negotiation at the time of the infringement, a Georgia Pacific factor.  We can only test consumers who are in the process of reaching a purchase decision now.  That said, plaintiffs, defendants and triers of fact may find being able to identify the extent to which a feature or component drives current customer demand is preferable to relying on hypothetical negotiations that would have taken place at the time of the infringement.

For Patents, It Still Comes Down to the Jury Verdict

Patent

Jury verdicts are fascinating with their simple power.  The jury is not asked to provide a long winded studied response to the case but rather to provide very simple responses to very difficult and complicated questions.  A lawyerly answer would be ‘its complicated,’ but that option is not allowed on the verdict form.

Masimo v. Philips involved a two week jury trial — two weeks of testimony where the two companies cross-asserted blood-oxygen monitor patents with competing experts at every front. Following that, the jury was given a simple form and it sided with Masimo to the tune of  $466 million dollars for past infringement.

MasimoDamages MasimoVerdict

Joe Re led the trial team for Masimo.

Federal Circuit Defies Supreme Court in Laches Holding

Patent, , , , ,

by Dennis Crouch

SCA Hygiene v. First Quality (Fed. Cir. 2014)

Rather than focusing on a single event, allegations of patent infringement generally involve a series of actions that each constitute an infringement.  Courts identify each act (making, using, selling, …) as a separate and actionable infringement of the patent.  This notion of repeated acts of infringement (the “separate-accrual rule”) is only occasionally important, but comes up most often in the context of the impact of delays in pursuing court action with the effect of making delays look less egregious.

The Patent Act includes a six-year limitation on collecting back-damages. 35 U.S.C. 286. The old equitable doctrine of laches has also traditionally been available to cut-off damages when the patentee unreasonably and inexcusably delayed in bringing suit.  Under the Federal Circuit’s 1992 en banc Aukerman decision, courts generally apply the same six-year timeline for laches – finding that a six-year delay in filing suit creates a presumption of unreasonable delay that, when coupled with detrimental reliance leads to a laches finding.  Although it only creates a presumption of unreasonableness, in my experience, this six-year delay makes laches much much more likely to be found. Laches then has the ordinary result of cutting-off all pre-suit damages. However, based on the aformentioned theory of individualized acts of infringement, a remedy remains available for infringement that occurs after the lawsuit is filed as well as the potential for further equitable relief to stop future infringement.

Laches is based on a tradition of equity and has no direct tie-in to the patent statute itself. Likewise, Laches is not found in the list of defenses under Section 282 nor identified as an aspect of the statutory limitation on damages. Of course, that is the tradition of equity — existing for times when the law fails.

Putting this entire area somewhat astir is the Supreme Court’s 2014 copyright laches decision in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 134 S.Ct. 1962 (2014).  In similar manner to patent law, the copyright statute has a three-year statute of limitations on filing suit.  In the case, the (alleged) copyright holder had delayed for 18-years in filing suit.  The statute-of-limitations cut-off all but the last three years of recovery and the lower court found that laches blocked recovery for those remaining three years.  However, in Petrella the Supreme Court revived the copyright claim and held instead that laches should not apply because Congress has taken fully spoken on the issue with its statute.

Laches, we hold, cannot be invoked to preclude adjudication of a claim for damages brought within the three-year window. . . .  [L]aches is a defense developed by courts of equity; its principal application was, and remains, to claims of an equitable cast for which the Legislature has provided no fixed time limitation. See 1 D. Dobbs, Law of Remedies 104 (1993) (“laches . . . may have originated in equity because no statute of limitations applied, . . . suggest[ing] that laches should be limited to cases in which no statute of limitations applies”). Both before and after the merger of law and equity in 1938, this Court has cautioned against invoking laches to bar legal relief. See Holmberg v. Armbrecht, 327 U. S. 392 (1946) (in actions at law, “[i]f Congress explicitly puts a limit upon the time for enforcing a right which it created, there is an end of the matter,” but “[t]raditionally . . . , statutes of limitation are not controlling measures of equitable relief “); Merck & Co. v.Reynolds, 559 U. S. 633 (2010) (quoting, for its current relevance, statement in United States v. Mack, 295 U. S. 480 (1935), that “[l]aches within the term of the statute of limitations is no defense [to an action] at law”); County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y., 470 U. S. 226, n. 16 (1985) (“[A]pplication of the equitable defense of laches in an action at law would be novel indeed.”).

An important element of the holding is the ongoing separation of legal and equitable remedies — with the notion that laches may still be obtained to block equitable remedies, but not to bar a traditional legal remedy such as past-damages.

In Petrella, the Supreme Court limited its particularly holding to copyright law and noted that “[w]e have not had occasion to review the Federal Circuit’s position” on laches in patent cases. Of course, the parallels between copyright and patent are strong in this situation and so we would expect the Federal Circuit to seriously consider whether Petrella should be applied to overrule Aukerman.

SCA v. First Quality: In 2003, SCA sent a C&D letter to First Quality in 2003 regarding patented adult diapers. However, in 2004, SCA filed for ex parte reexamination that was completed in 2007 with a confirmation of patentability. Finally, in 2010, SCA filed the lawsuit against First Quality.  By that time (beginning in 2006) First Quality had greatly expanded its use of the underlying concepts of the invention (it doesn’t leak).  Rather than deciding the lawsuit, the district court dismissed the case based upon the delay finding both laches and equitable estoppel.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed – most notably holding that the Petrella decision has no impact on the adjudication of laches in patent cases.  However, rather than addressing the clear and obvious tension, the court simply wrote:

Petrella notably left Aukerman intact. See id. at
1974 n.15 (“We have not had occasion to review the Federal Circuit’s position.”). Because Aukerman may only be overruled by the Supreme Court or an en banc panel of this court, Aukerman remains controlling precedent.

While clinging to the Aukerman approach, affirmance was easy because the six-year delay creates a strong presumption of unreasonable delay.  However, the court did reverse the summary judgment of equitable estoppel because there was no evidence of the required affirmative act such as a misleading communication leading to detrimental reliance on the notion that the defendant’s infringement would be permissible.

The decision here is notable for its glaring reticence. The panel of Judges Reyna, Wallach, and Hughes are all relatively new and perhaps expect en banc review of this issue.  Many (perhaps most) other judges on the court would have made their mark rather than simply passing.

Although I believe, on balance, that Petrella controls here, the case is not open-and-shut because there are important distinctions as you move from copyright to patent. Notably, the copyright statute of limitations is a more direct and total limit on filing suit while in patent law the statute only limits the collection of too-far-back damages. Thus, in this situation, Congress seems to have spoken more fully in the copyright realm. Additionally, the three versus six year limit appears important because, in the time-scale of lawsuits and three years is a relatively short time while six-years begins to allow for much more unreasonableness and detrimental reliance.  That time differential is further compounded by the fact that three years is quite a small bit of the copyright term (5%) while six-years is often more than 1/3 of the patent term — suggesting that a patentee’s should move more quickly.

If anything, this issue will be interesting to watch.

Design Patents §103 – Obvious to Whom and As Compared to What?

Patent, , , , ,

Guest Post by Paul Morgan

This is an increasing important and not fully resolved legal issue which should logically be addressed in the pending Fed. Cir. appeal of the nearly $1 billion infringement damages award in Apple v. Samsung, re the Apple design patents held infringed.   That award seems to have inspired increased design patent assertions and design application filings.  In that case Judge Koh had even called the application of the Supreme Courts controlling KSR decision on §103 an “open question” as to design patents!  Apple, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Case No.: II-CV-01846-LHK, Slip Op. at 19 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 2, 2011).   These issues could also arise soon in PTO IPR PTAB decision appeals to the Fed. Cir.  The PTAB has already issued a final written decision in the first IPR against a design patent. Munchkin, Inc. and Toys “R” US, Inc. v. Luv N’ Care, Ltd, IPR 2013-00072 (Paper No. 28) (April 21, 2014).

In contrast to utility patent litigation, in design patent litigation summary judgments for non-infringement are relatively rare, while summary judgments for §103 obviousness are more common.  This is so even though they have the very same §103. Yet the Supreme Court’s controlling §103 guidelines in KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc, 550 U. S. 398 (2007) have been strangely totally ignored or not applied in many subsequent design cases.  Instead, unique old Fed. Cir. case law is still being applied in making §103 design prior art comparisons and combinations, as discussed below.  Perhaps this reportedly high rate of design patent §103 summary judgments logically correlates with the prior study and report on this blog at: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2010/01/design-patent-rejections.html showing that design patent applications are issued with only rare §103 rejections by PTO design patent application examiners?  That is, prior art is rarely being applied at the examination stage.  Again, this is opposite from PTO utility patent application examination, even though under the very same §103 standard.  A recent example of a Fed. Cir. sustained §103 summary judgment of two design patents in suit isMRC Innovations v. Hunter Mfg. (Fed. Cir. 2014).

Is another reason for relatively less non-infringement than §103 summary judgments in design patent cases due in part to the usual absence of any verbal claim distinctions, plus the Egyptian Goddess “ordinary observer” test?   The “ordinary observer” test for designpatent infringement must also be contrasted with the traditional judicial view of design patent “claims scope” as narrow – see, e.g., cases cited in the article “Functionality and Design Patent Validity and Infringement”, 91 Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society (JPTOS) 313, May, 2009, by Perry J. Saidman of the DesignLaw Group.  But is the scope of design patents now being treated consistently with the black-letter case law that claims in litigation must have the same scope for infringement and validity?  Is there a problem with lack of legal guidance of how prior art is to be treated in defining a design patent’s claim scope for, or before, an “ordinary observer” infringement test?  [It has been argued that this was a jury instruction defect in the above Apple decision.]

In what seems like a remarkably begrudging semi-admission [which may be due to its particular panel members], the panel in Titan Tire Corp. v. Case New Holland, Inc. 566 F.3d 1372, (Fed. Cir. 2009) said that “it is not obvious that the Supreme Court necessarily intended to exclude design patents from the reach of KSR.”  However even this Fed. Cir. panel held that: “Our precedents teach that ‘the ultimate inquiry under section 103 is whether the claimed design would have been obvious to a designer of ordinary skill who designs articles of the type involved.’ Durling v. Spectrum Furniture Co., 101 F.3d 100, 103 (Fed. Cir. 1996) (citing In re Rosen, 673 F.2d 388, 390 (CCPA 1982)).”

Yet the patent statute at §171 is perfectly clear that design patents have the very same §103 as other patents.  §103 requires “..that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious .. to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains” [emphasis supplied].  For design patents  that has to be a person having ordinary skill in the art of industrial product design, not the non-skill level of any lay person, such as a jury member.    [This §103 requirement should, of course, not be confused with a §102 novelty test.]

The prior en banc Federal Circuit “Egyptian Goddess” decision on design patent infringement, Egyptian Goddess, Inc. v. Swisa, Inc. 543 F.3d 665 (Fed. Cir. 2008), notes, just after referring to “the hypothetical ordinary observer who is conversant with the prior art” test fordesign patent infringement, that: “We emphasize that although the approach we adopt will frequently involve comparisons between the claimed design and the prior art, it is not a test for determining validity, but is designed solely as a test of infringement.”  Unfortunately this en  banc Egyptian Goddess decision did not clarify that statement further.

In High Point Design LLC v. Buyers Direct, Inc., (Fed. Cir. 2013) a Fed. Cir. panel had to face up to the District Court below having been mislead by one of the Court’s own prior design patent decisions, and had to re-clarify its §103 “obvious to whom” case law.  Key text in this High Point Design decision includes:

The use of an “ordinary observer” standard to assess the potential obviousness of a design patent runs contrary to the precedent of this court and our predecessor court, under which the obviousness of a design patent must, instead, be assessed from the viewpoint of an ordinary designer. See Apple, 678 F.3d at 1329 (“In addressing a claim of obviousness in a design patent, ‘the  ultimate inquiry . is whether the claimed design would have been obvious to a designer of ordinary skill who designs articles of the type involved.’”) (quoting Durling, 101 F.3d at 103); Titan Tire Corp. v. Case New Holland, Inc., 566 F.3d 1372, 1380–81 (Fed. Cir. 2009) (same); In re Borden, 90 F.3d 1570, 1574 (Fed. Cir. 1996) (“The central inquiry in analyzing an ornamental design for obviousness is whether the design would have been obvious to ‘a designer of ordinary skill who designs articles of the type involved.’”) ..

Although High Point Design cites prior Fed. Cir. decisions which note §103, its does not base the decision directly on this controlling statute, as it could and should have!   Instead, this High Point Design footnote 2 below unsuccessfully attempts to explain-away a priorconflicting, erroneous “ordinary observer” invalidity test decision, but ends up by noting that it cannot, in any event, overrule even earlier Fed. Cir. decisions:

2 We do not believe our decision in International Seaway Trading Corp. v. Walgreens Corp., 589 F.3d 1233, 1240 (Fed. Cir. 2009), cited by the district court, compelsa contrary conclusion. The International Seaway court may in fact have had the “designer of ordinary skill” standard in mind when it used the term “ordinary observer.” In any event, the court could not rewrite precedent setting forth the designer of ordinary skill standard. See Vas Cath, Inc. v. Mahurkar, 935 F.2d 1555, 1563 (Fed. Cir. 1991); Newell Cos., Inc. v. Kenney Mfg. Co., 864 F.3d 757, 765 (Fed. Cir. 1998).

This High Point Design decision should, finally, end part of the debate over the proper “obvious to whom” test for design patent obviousness.  [Prior §103 design patent decisions include In re Nalbandian, 661 F.2d 1214, 1215-16 (CCPA 1981) and In re Carter, 673 F.2d 1378 (CCPA 1982), both cited in MPEP Section 1504.03, and the above Walter E. Durling v. Spectrum Furniture Company, Inc., 101 F.3d 100, 103 (Fed. Cir. 1996).]

* * * *

However, High Point Design still leaves another important unresolved §103 issue for design patents, one serious enough that it may end up in another Supreme Court challenge if the Fed. Cir. does not address it.  I have labeled this the “as compared to what”? question.    Because High Point Design does not even mention KSR and instead continues to apply an additional and unique “obviousness” analysis requirement for design patents from old pre-KSR case law.  An additional requirement that is not in §103 and does not seem consistent with KSR or even some other §103 combination of references case law.   Specifically, High Point Design states:

When assessing the potential obviousness of a design patent, a finder of fact employs two distinct steps: first, “one must find a single reference, a something in existence, the design characteristics of which are basically the same as the claimed design”; second, “[o]nce this primary reference is found, other references may be used to modify it to create a design that has the same overall visual appearance as the claimed design.” Durling v. Spectrum Furniture Co., 101 F.3d 100, 103 (Fed. Cir. 1996) (internal quotations omitted); see also Apple, Inc. v. Samsung Elecs. Co., 678 F.3d 1314, 1329 (Fed. Cir. 2012). Under the first step, a court must both “(1) discern the correct visual impression created by the patented design as a whole; and (2) determine whether there is a single reference that creates ‘basically the same’ visual impression.” Durling, 101 F.3d at 103.”

Another way in which this above unique old special §103 test for design patents is sometimes expressed is a requirement to “first find a Rosen reference” (In re Leon Rosen, 673 F.2d 388, 391 (CCPA 1982)).  [That may be quite difficult in some cases.]  Note particularly the above High Point requirements for first finding a single reference that has “basically the same” design characteristics and visual impression, and only modifying it with other references to create “the same overall visual appearance.” Does that seem appropriate for a normal §103 analysis?  Does this old judicially created §103 analysis for design patents not significantly reduce §103-usable or combinable prior art?  How is that consistent with the controlling Sup. Ct. KSR §103 guidance for combining references, completely ignored in High Point Design?  Has anyone suggested any reason why KSR does not apply to design patent §103 analysis?

In this respect, here are some specific §103-KSR issues to consider.  Is not the designing of costly consumer products intended to be sold by the millions [like smart phones] an “art” in which the §103 “ordinary skill” level of product designers would be expected to be especially high?   Furthermore, do not professional product designers normally work on many different products and use product appearance design ideas from many different fields and products, far more than for utililty patents?  To express that another way, should not “non-analogous art” arguments against combining art for a 103 rejection be even less effective for design patents after KSR than for utility patents?

* * * * *

I have no stake in any of these interesting legal issues.  I simply think members and professional organizations of the patent bar as well as legal academics should be doing more pro bono thinking about them.  Hopefully the Federal Circuit will provide clearer guidance in future decisions.

 

Important Damages Opinion: VirnetX v. Cisco and Apple

Patent, ,

By Jason Rantanen

VirnetX, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2014)  Virnetx v Cisco
Panel: Prost (author) and Chen

Plaintiffs VirnetX and Science Applications International Corporation obtained a successful verdict against Apple based on infringement by its Facetime and VPN On Demand products.  The two accused products are programs that run on Apple’s iOS platforms (e.g.: iPhones, iPads, iMacs, MacBooks, etc.).  FaceTime is a videoconferencing platform (similar to Skype) and VPN On Demand is a feature that allows iOS users to establish secure virtual private networks.  The patents involved were Nos. 6,502,135 and 7,490,151, which were asserted with respect to VPN On Demand, and 7,418,504 and 7,921,211, which were asserted against FaceTime.   The jury found the four patents were valid and infringed, awarding damages of $368,160,000.  Apple appealed.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit upheld the jury verdict of no invalidity and infringement as to most of the ‘135 and ‘151 claims (i.e.: the ones being asserted against VPN On Demand).  However, it reversed as to a doctrine-of-equivalents finding on one claim of the ‘151 and as to claim construction of a term in the ‘504 and ‘211 patents (i.e.: the ones being asserted against Facetime), thus resulting in a remand as to those claims.

The most important legal aspect of the court’s opinion, however, relates to damages.  At trial, VirnetX’s expert offered three reasonable royalty theories: one that began with the lowest sales price of each iOS device containing the accused feature and applying a 1% royalty to that base, and two that relied on the “Nash Bargaining Solution,” a mathematical theorem proved by Nobel Laureate John Nash.

“Smallest Salable Unit”: A key issue in calculating the infringement damages for complex technological products is whether it is appropriate to use the value of the entire device in the damages calculation.  Generally speaking it is not appropriate to do so: “when claims are drawn to an individual component of a multi-component product, it is the exception, not the rule, that damages may be based upon the value of the multi-component product.”  Slip Op. at 27.  Rather, “‘[a] patentee may assess damages based on the entire market value of the accused product only where the patented feature creates the basis for customer demand or substantially creates the value of the component parts.'” Id., quoting Versata Software, Inc. v. SAP Am., Inc., 717 F.3d 1255, 1268 (Fed. Cir. 2013) (emphasis added by court).  This is due to the general requirement that damages must be actually attributable to the infringing features within a reasonable degree of precision.

However, there is a line of cases suggesting that royalties may be based off of the “smallest salable patent-practicing unit.”  It was this line of cases that the district court presumably drew upon when it issued the relevant jury instruction:

In determining a royalty base, you should not use the value of the entire apparatus or product unless either: (1) the patented feature creates the basis for the customers’ demand for the product, or the patented feature substantially creates the value of the other component parts of the product; or (2) the product in question constitutes the smallest saleable unit containing the patented feature.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit held that the “smallest salable unit” case law does not mean that “when the smallest salable unit is used as the royalty base, there is necessarily no further constraint on the selection of the base.”  Id. at 28.  Rather, “the smallest salable unit approach was intended to produce a royalty base much more closely tied to the claimed invention than the entire market value of the accused products.” Id. at 29.  Thus,

“Where the smallest salable unit is, in fact, a multi-component product containing several non-infringing features with no relation to the patented feature (as VirnetX claims it was here), the patentee must do more to estimate what portion of the value of that product is attributable to the patented technology. To hold otherwise would permit the entire market value exception to swallow the rule of apportionment.”

Id.  Since the VirnetX’s expert relied on the iOS devices as the “‘smallest salable units,’ without attempting to apportion the value attributable to the VPN On Demand and Facetime features,” the legal error was not harmless.  Put another way, VirnetX sought to have the jury use the sales price of an iPhone when calculating infringement of its patents that covered two specific components of that product, without demonstrating that those components drove customer demand for the phones.

Royalty Base * Royalty Rate Theory:  For similar reasons, the Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling to allow the expert’s testimony that used the sales price of iOS devices as the royalty base.  The accused products included both hardware and software components; the expert “made no attempt to separate software from hardware, much less to separate the FaceTime software from other valuable software components.”  Slip Op. at 31.  This was particularly problematic, since in his Nash Bargaining Solution approaches, the expert did attempt to break out the patentable contributions to the devices.  More, “a patentee’s obligation to apportion damages only to the patented features does not end with the identification of the smallest salable unit if that unit still contains significant unpatented features.”  Id. at 32.  Thus, it did not matter that Apple did not sell FaceTime separately on many of its iOS products: 

There is no “necessity-based exception to the entire market value rule.” Id. at 70. On the contrary, a patentee must be reasonable (though may be approximate) when seeking to identify a patent-practicing unit, tangible or intangible, with a close relation to the patented feature.

Id.  Apple also challenged the expert’s 1% royalty rate, which relied on six allegedly comparable licenses and VirnetX’s “policy” of licensing its patents for 1-2%.  The Federal Circuit concluded that reliance on the six challenged licenses was permissible.

Nash Bargaining Solution Theories: In addition to its ruling on the “smallest salable unit” issue, the Federal Circuit also rejected the invocation of the Nash Bargaining Solution as a model for reasonable royalty damages.  As described by the court, this theorem states that “under the conditions stated in the premises, where two person bargain over a matter, there is a ‘solution’…in which ‘each bargainer get[s] the same money profit.”  (The Nash Bargaining Solution).  The Nash Bargaining Solution is invoked to support the argument that the parties would have split between themselves the incremental profit associated with the patent technology.

Here, VirnetX’s expert used the Nash Bargaining Solution to support royalty rate that allocated 45% of the profits from the Facetime feature to VirtnetX.  (For these calculations, the expert used a much lower valuation of the feature than in the first approach discussed above).

The Federal Circuit held that the Nash Bargaining Solution may not be invoked “without sufficiently establishing that the premises of the theorem actually apply to the facts of the case at hand.”  Id. at 38.  That was not done here; rather, the use of the Nash Solution was as much an inappropriate “rule of thumb” as the “25 percent rule of thumb” rejected in Uniloc USA, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 632 F.3d 1292, 1320 (Fed. Cir. 2011):

The Nash theorem arrives at a result that follows from a certain set of premises. It itself asserts nothing about what situations in the real world fit those premises. Anyone seeking to invoke the theorem as applicable to a particular situation must establish that fit, because the 50/50 profit-split result is proven by the theorem only on those premises. [The expert] did not do so. This was an essential failing in invoking the Solution.

Slip Op. at 38-39.  Indeed, “even if an expert could identify all of the factors that would cause negotiating parties to deviate from the 50/50 baseline in a particular case, the use of this methodology would nevertheless run the significant risk of inappropriately skewing the jury’s verdict.”  Id.

Is VPN Software Patent Eligible?

Patent, , ,

VirnetX v. Cisco and Apple (Fed. Cir. 2014)

An E.D. Texas jury sided with the patentee VirnetX — finding that the four asserted patents are not-invalid and that Apple’s VPN-On-Demand and FaceTime products infringe.  The jury then awarded $350 million in damages.  On appeal, Apple presented a number of winning arguments that, in the end, result in only a partial victory because some of the claims remain valid and infringed.  After altering claim construction of the term “secure communication link”, the jury will re-determine whether FaceTime infringes and recalculate damages.

Before getting into the merits (in a separate post), we might pause to consider the subject matter eligibility of asserted claim 1 of Patent No. 7,418,504:

1. A system for providing a domain name service for establishing a secure communication link, the system comprising:
a domain name service system configured
to be connected to a communication network,
to store a plurality of domain names and corresponding network addresses,
to receive a query for a network address, and
to comprise an indication that the domain name service system supports establishing a secure communication link.

At a high level of abstraction, the invention is designed to implement private communication which, at that generalized level would likely be seen as an abstract idea.  The particular implementation steps included in the claim here are themselves written in broad functional language whose implementation were well known and conventional aspects of DNS systems as of the 1998 application date.  Now, the court does not sua sponte raise the 101 issue here and so we do not know the answer.

Guest Post: Publishing Design Patent Applications: Time to Act

Patent, , , , , ,

Gary L. Griswold

Mr. Griswold is a Consultant residing in Hudson, WI and was formerly President and Chief Intellectual Property Counsel for 3M Innovative Properties Company. The essay reflects the views of the author. He wishes to thank Bob Armitage and Mike Kirk for their excellent contributions to the essay.

Overview

Design patenting has come of age. According to a recent World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) study, the filing of design patent applications more than doubled between 2004 and 2011.[1] The stakes in design patent litigation today can be enormous. One commentator on the recent Apple-Samsung iPhone IP wars noted, “After operating in the intellectual property backwaters for years, design patents took center stage in the epic battle.”[2]

Enterprises of all sizes have come to recognize the value to be had from securing patents on their innovative designs. This also means that more businesses now need to consider whether design patents of others might impair their freedom to operate when placing a new product on the market.

Unlike conventional (“utility”) patent applications, design patent applications are not subject to the “publication” provisions that were placed in the U.S. patent law in 1999 with the enactment of the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA). Utility patent applications, with a few exceptions, must all be published and made publicly available within 18 months after filing.[3]   However, all design patent applications are required to be kept in secret in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) until the patent issues on the application.

Today this secrecy can have significant and negative consequences – for the design’s creator and for those who commit resources to manufacture a similar product before the issuance of the design patent. Unlike most utility patents today, the first inkling that a patent is being sought on a new product’s design may come with grant of a design patent, in other words come at the end of the examination process in the USPTO.

The growing importance of design patents suggests that this exclusion from publication with respect to design patent application publication should be rectified by Congress. This can best be done by requiring that all pending design patent applications be made available to the public by publishing these applications at 6 months after the date that they were originally filed.

Doing so would put the public on notice, shortly after the design patent application is filed, that a new product’s design may be protected. The growing prominence of design patenting, as well as other developments in the law since 1999, now make it timely for Congress to act.

Background

Two major pieces of patent legislation over the past 15 years have worked to make the U.S. patent law operate with vastly greater transparency, predictability and simplicity. The AIPA, with its requirement that most new non-design patent filings must be published at 18-months after their original filing dates was followed by a host of even more significant patent reforms. These were contained in the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011.[4]

Key provisions of the AIA were designed to allow inventors to accurately assess whether they could secure – or had secured – a valid patent. For utility patents, access to earlier-filed patent applications comes though the AIPA’s publication provisions. Clearly, since some patents can take years to issue, holding earlier-filed patent applications in secrecy in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) until a patent issued meant that an inventor might mistakenly invest based on the apparent validity of a patent that might then evaporate upon the issuance of a patent on a never-published, earlier-filed patent application.

The AIA also sought to assure that members of the public could more effectively participate in the patenting process. It allowed members of the public to be involved in the determination of whether a claimed invention in a patent application can be validly issued as a patent, both before the patent issues and after the patent issuance.

If action is taken promptly after a pending patent application is published, the AIA permits a member of the public to make a “pre-grant submission” of relevant prior art that the patent examiner handling the patent application must consider in deciding whether a patent should issue on the application.[5] These submissions, most notably include the earlier-sought patent applications of other inventors that have been published under the AIPA’s provisions.

In addition, the new “post-grant review” or “PGR” provisions of the AIA permit a member of the public to raise in a USPTO proceeding any issue of a patent’s validity that could be raised in court by someone accused of infringing the patent. However, these PGR provisions, like the pre-grant submission provisions, require that an individual act promptly. In this case, the PGR petition must be filed within nine months of the issue date of the patent that is being opposed.

Given the formidable requirements for requesting a PGR, most individuals making a PGR request will benefit from advance notice that a patent is about to issue. This notice, of course, is automatic when the patent application has been published under the AIPA’s provisions.

The manner in which the AIA built upon the AIPA’s provisions, both with pre-grant submissions and with post-grant review, work to benefit patent owners and their potential competitors alike. However, while these new pre-grant and post-grant provisions technically apply both to design and utility patents, the lack of any “publication provision” for design patents means that these provisions are now significantly less effective for designs.

The Rationale for Excluding Design Patents from the AIPA Publication Provisions No Longer Makes Sense

When the AIPA was enacted, there were two significant exceptions to the rule that pending applications for patent would be published and made publicly accessible. First, these provisions allowed inventors seeking only U.S. patents to opt-out of the publication requirement. This was done for inventors interested in patent protection only for the U.S. market on the assumption that at least some of them might not want their inventions publicly disclosed if they were ultimately not going to be able to receive a valid patent. However, for almost all such inventions, marketing the invention necessarily discloses to the public what the invention is and, in fact, discloses much more about the invention to the public than would normally be found in an inventor’s patent application if published.

Thus, this rationale, particularly today, makes little sense. The inventor can be “protected” from public disclosure by opting-out of the publication provisions of the AIPA only in the situation where the invention is never commercialized and essentially has no economic value, or in the limited situations where the invention can be effectively practiced as a trade secret. Consequently, it is a protection that seldom affords any economic value to the inventor.

Under the AIA, the publication of an invention in a pending patent application provides an inventor with a guarantee that no one else will be able to successfully secure a patent on the same or a similar invention based on an application filed after the inventor’s patent filing. Where someone subsequently files for a patent, the earlier-filed application limits the later-filing inventor to validly patenting only subject matter both novel and non-obvious over what was disclosed in the earlier-filed application.

Design patents were totally excluded from the 18-month publication provisions. The rationale for the design patent exclusion can be found in the legislative history of the AIPA: “Since design applications do not disclose technology, inventors do not have a particular interest in having them published.” That statement, whatever its validity then, was made before design patenting came of age and has little relevance today, as evidenced by the litigation between Apple and Samsung.

Another reason given for the design exception was that “The Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs” was being revised and that any change to the design patent law should await the outcome of that exercise. That outcome is now clear; Congress has acted to remove the exception for design patents filed under The Hague Agreement.[6]

Yet another reason that design patents may have been left out of the mix when the publication provisions of the AIPA were being drafted was the short pendency of a design patent application. “Pendency” is the time taken by a patent examiner between filing and issuance of the design patent. With pre-grant submissions of prior art and post-grant review under the AIA now in place, that relatively shorter pendency before the Patent Office for design applications versus utility applications makes it much more important to have design applications not only published, but published quite promptly, i.e., at six months from the patent filing.[7]

The last reason Congress may have excepted design patents from publication is that some manufacturers may not have wanted the designs for new products to be prematurely disclosed, prior to market introduction.[8] Under the AIA, however, the filing of a design patent application assures that no similar designs can be patented based upon a later-filed design patent application. In addition, early publication puts competitors on notice that there is a “patent pending” on the design so that they dare not copy the design without the risk of infringing a subsequently issued design patent. Instead of a problem for manufacturers, pre-grant publication carries with it undeniably important benefits.

In addition to the “notice” function that arises from publishing a design patent application, inventors whose design patent applications publish secure yet another benefit under the AIPA. They can qualify for “provisional rights” – that is the right to collect reasonable royalty damages from anyone who uses the design during the period from the date the user received notice of the published design application until issuance of the patent on the design.[9] This again reflects the upsides of publication, much potential gain with a negligible prospect of incurring any pain.

Conclusions

The AIA increased the openness and transparency of the patent system by providing for pre-grant submissions and post- grant review. These provisions work to protect the public against patents that lack valid claims – and similarly protect the inventor from making investments in reliance on patents that could never be successfully enforced. Those aspects of the AIA are premised in part on the publication of pending patent applications.   Whatever reasons can be cited for excluding design patent applications from these important provisions of the AIPA, such reasons now have only historic significance. Today, all design patent inventors deserve equal treatment. The availability of the benefits of publishing pending design patent applications should not depend on where a design patent inventor seeks patent protection.

In sum, the agreement to allow publication of design patent applications filed by U.S. inventors under The Hague Agreement represents a significant step by the United States toward achieving the open, transparent 21st century patent system contemplated by the AIPA and AIA. The increase in design patent application activity – and the prominence of design patent enforcement efforts – renders this a perfect time to remove the exclusion from publication of those design patent applications filed only in the United States.

 

[1] According to WIPO, in 2012, “the 1.22 million industrial designs contained in applications grew by 17%—the highest growth on record.” http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/freepublications/en/statistics/943/wipo_pub_943_2013.pdf, at p. 4.

[2] See http://designpatentattorney.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Carani-Lanslide-Article-Design-Patents-Take-Center-Stage-Jan-Feb-2013.pdf.

[3] Most utility patent applications must be published under the AIPA’s publication provisions. The time period set for publishing utility patents is 18 months after the initial patent filing date. 35 U.S.C. § 122(b).

[4] The United States adopted a so-called first-inventor-to-file system as the principle for determining what subject matter can represent “prior art” to a claimed invention. Also, a number of subjective and non-transparent aspects of the rules on patenting were removed.

[5] Because prior art can be submitted to the USPTO anonymously, members of the public and competitors of the applicant are normally comfortable in making such submissions. Since the processing time is shorter for design patent applications than that of utility patent applications, a narrower time window (e.g., before the earlier of a notice of allowance and the later of (1) the first rejection or (2) 2 months after publication) would be necessary for submitting third party submissions.

[6] The implementing legislation for the Geneva Act of The Hague Agreement has been enacted by the United States and rules for its implementation are being finalized by the USPTO. Once the rules are completed, the formal process for membership will be initiated and completed. The Common Regulations Under the 1999 [Geneva] Act and the 1960 Act of The Hague Agreement provide for publication of international applications six months after the date of the international Registration (which occurs upon receipt by WIPO of the international application). This publication of the international application will be considered a publication in the U.S. under 35 USC 390. The U.S. will not allow deferral of publication. Thus, any concerns related to the early publication of design patent applications as a policy matter have already been decided by Congress in favor of publication.

[7] As with utility patent applications, the public may well be aware of better prior art for design patent applications than the USPTO. If design patent applications were published, interested members of the public could submit prior art to the USPTO with the result that any issuing design patents would have been more thoroughly examined, benefiting both the applicant and public.

[8] Because of the speed of issuance, design applications filed only in the U.S. would need to be published 6 months after their U.S. filing date. Any concern with timing of publication relative to commercialization would seem to be handled by a 6 month period between filing and publication, which mirrors The Hague Agreement, and the relatively rapid grant (typically 15 months) of design patents.

[9] By providing that publication under The Hague Agreement will be deemed a publication under 35 USC 122(b), the implementing legislation (35 U.S.C. 390) makes such design patent applications eligible for provisional rights under 35 USC 154(d).

Compulsory License as a Remedy for Trade Secret Misappropriation

Patent, ,

by Dennis Crouch

Sabatino Bianco, M.D. v. Globus Medical, 2:12-cv-00147 (E.D. Tex 2014) (Decision)

Spinal FusionFederal Circuit Judge William Bryson is sitting by designation in this trade-secret misappropriation case brought by the Dr. Bianco, a Texas Neurosurgeon. According to the allegations, Bianco shared his intervertebral fusion device with Globus (under a confidentiality agreement) and then Globus began selling its version of the device. The jury sided with the doctor, finding Globus liable for trade-secret misappropriation and awarded $4.2 million in past damages. Following the jury verdict, Judge Bryson denied Bianco’s request for permanent injunctive relief. In that decision, the court concluded that three of the eBay factors pushed against such a ‘dramatic’ award: irreparable harm; balance of the hardships; and the public interest.

In his most recent opinion in the case, Judge Bryson has awarded ongoing damages of 5% of Globus’s future sales of the device (for the next 15-years). The one problem with the Judge’s decision is that he did not cite a single case where ongoing royalties have been awarded for trade secret misappropriation under Texas law. Rather, Judge Bryson analogized to the Federal Circuit’s decision in Paice LLC v. Toyota Motor Corp., 504 F.3d 1293 (Fed.Cir.2007) that permitted the award of ongoing (future) damages for patent infringement at a set reasonable royalty rate. Judge Bryson writes here:

Although this case involves trade secret misappropriation rather than patent infringement, the two torts are sufficiently analogous that the Federal Circuit’s decision in Paice, as supplemented by cases from the Federal Circuit and from this district that have applied Paice [in the patent context] provide an appropriate starting point for this Court in deciding whether to grant an ongoing royalty and what the amount of that royalty should be.

Of course, this trade secret case is based upon Texas state law and not on Federal Patent law and the remedy must be guided by Texas law even if limited by the Federal Court’s equitable power. In the interesting case of Guarantee Trust Co. of New York v. York, 326 U.S. 99 (1945), the Supreme Court explained:

This does not mean that whatever equitable remedy is available in a State court must be available in a diversity suit in a federal court, or conversely, that a federal court may not afford an equitable remedy not available in a State court. . . . State law cannot define the remedies which a federal court must give simply because a federal court in diversity jurisdiction is available as an alternative tribunal to the State’s courts. Contrariwise, a federal court may afford an equitable remedy for a substantive right recognized by a State even though a State court cannot give it. Whatever contradiction or confusion may be produced by a medley of judicial phrases severed from their environment, the body of adjudications concerning equitable relief in diversity cases leaves no doubt that the federal courts enforced State-created substantive rights if the mode of proceeding and remedy were consonant with the traditional body of equitable remedies, practice and procedure, and in so doing they were enforcing rights created by the States and not arising under any inherent or statutory federal law.

To be clear, the ongoing damages award in Paice has been classified as equitable because it goes beyond what would have been available to a court of law.

In eBay, the Supreme Court spelled out the factors that must be considered as a pre-requisite before a Federal Court can award permanent injunctive relief. Although that case focused on injunctive relief, the Supreme Court requires federal courts to walk through several steps before any equitable relief is awarded. In the York case cited above, the court wrote that any award of equitable relief by a Federal Court “is of course subject to restrictions: the suit must be within the traditional scope of equity as historically evolved in the English Court of Chancery. . . ; explicit Congressional curtailment of equity powers must be respected. . .; the constitutional right to trial by jury cannot be evaded. . . ”  In general, any ongoing royalty award should also also include a determination that the remedies available at law are inadequate to protect the interest of the right holder.

Where to Appeal?: It will be interesting to see how the Federal Circuit handles this case on appeal. (The complaint also requests change of inventorship under 35 U.S.C. 256).

The case should also serve as a warning against parties seeking injunctive relief in Federal Courts. Namely, Federal Courts are required to follow eBay even when enforcing State law.  State courts are not so limited.

Guest Post: Selectively Targeting the Patent Troll Problem

Patent

Over the past two years, a number of legislative proposals have been proposed to address the perceived problem of “patent trolls.” A common problem of the proposed reform mechanisms is that they would result in broad reforms against all patent owners rather than specifically targeting problematic elements. For those with general anti-patent bent, that result may be acceptable. However, the pro-patent lobby remains strong enough to ensure that congressional reforms will not completely eviscerate the system. In his guest post below, Mr. Shah outlines his proposal for reforms that more selectively target patent trolls. – Dennis

Guest Post by Varun A. Shah, Head of IP Development for Aruba Networks.

The Innovation Act was a great attempt at solving the patent troll problem for the Information Technology industry. For example, the Innovation Act proposed heightened pleading standards for asserting patent infringement. However, the Innovation Act is now stalled in Congress, in part, due to the rejection by the Pharmaceutical and Biotech industries of new requirements for enforcing patents such as the heightened pleading standards. A solution is needed that solves the patent troll problem for the Information Technology industry without reducing the patent assertion rights of the original patent Applicant, i.e., the innovator.

I propose modifying the Innovation Act to require heightened pleading standards only if the current patent owner is not (a) the original Applicant or (b) an assignee that the Applicant is obligated to assign to at time of filing. In other words, only third parties (e.g., patent trolls or middle men) that acquire the patent would be required to follow the heightened pleading standards for asserting patents. Similarly, other patent rights, damages, and requirements for patents would depend on whether or not the current patent owner is (a) the original Applicant /an assignee that the original Applicant is obligated to assign to at time of filing or (b) a third party that acquired the patent. In case of legitimate business spin-offs (that are not primarily a patent sale), the business spin-off or acquiring company would hold the same rights as the original Applicant, and would not be subject to heightened pleading requirements for asserting patents.

This proposal reduces the patent troll problem for the Information Technology industry without reducing the patent assertion rights for the original patent Applicant. More generally, this proposal will protect the interests of all innovators that actually generate the ideas/patents while partially diluting the value of the patents if commoditized and transferred to others that are abusing and burdening the patent system. This re-structuring of patent value is in-line with the true goals of the patent system, i.e., the promotion of innovation.

= = = = =

Mr. Shah suggests that those who care about these ideas should contact the policymakers: Senator Leahy, Representative Goodlatte, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

Federal Circuit: You Don’t Infringe . . . You Still Must Pay for Infringing

Patent,

By Dennis Crouch

Retractable Tech v. Becton Dickinson and Co (Fed. Cir. 2014)

This patent infringement lawsuit is now in its seventh year. The case revolves around a set of patents owned by Retractable that cover a form of retractable safety-syringe. The original jury found that BDs 1mL and 3mL syringes both infringe with the result of $5 million for past damages and the district court ordered a permanent injunction. In the 2011 appeal, the Federal Circuit altered that claim construction and concluded that there was no infringement of the 3mL devices. On remand, the district court then altered the injunction (to only focus on the 1mL device). However, the district court refused to reconsider the damage award – finding that the damage award was subject to a final judgment that had not been directly appealed nor the subject of an order for reconsideration from the prior appeal. Now, the Federal Circuit affirms that judgment – finding that the lower court properly precluded BD from re-raising the damages issue on remand. This case is a bit of a civil procedure oddity. The jury awarded damages for infringement based on a finding that two different products infringe and final judgment was entered. The appellate court then partially reversed the decision – finding that only one of the products infringed. But, the infringer is not able to get the damage award modified.

In Verizon Services v. Vonage, 503 F.3d 1295 (Fed. Cir 2007), the court wrote that “where the jury rendered a single verdict on damages, without breaking down the damages attributable to each patent, the normal rule would require a new trial as to damages.” That case appears on-point to the present situation. However, both the district court and appellate panel have disagreed – finding that a district court is not permitted “to revisit damages in the absence of a reversal or remand of a damages determination. . . . [T]here is no ‘normal rule’ giving district courts the authority to regularly revisit or recalculate damages that fall within our mandate.”

Conceding that the rule here is very much a technicality, the court writes that the whole case outcome would be different had BD included one additional phrase in its prior appeal brief that requested a remand on the damages issue. Although a technicality, it appears that the decision not to include that phrase was a strategic decision made by BD’s appellate attorneys from WilmerHale and not any sort of oversight. In particular, BD wanted (and asked for) a bigger outcome (complete reversal or new trial) rather than simply a reduction in the damage award. I don’t believe that anyone will go home feeling sorry for BD.

This decision here was written by Judge Linn and joined by Judge Lourie. Judge Rader had been on the original panel but has now retired and thus did not participate in the final determination.

“Mine-run” and other puzzles

Patent,

By Jason Rantanen

I’m currently spending much of my time attempting to untangle the mess that is the law around Section 284 enhanced damages (i.e.: willful infringement) and Section 285 attorney fee awards (i.e.: exceptional case determinations).  Octane Fitness doesn’t reset the field so much as add a new layer to an already complex area of law, a layer that also potentially impacts willful infringement due to the Federal Circuit’s linking of the two standards.

There’s a term in Octane Fitness, though, that leaped out at me as I was reading the Court’s opinion.  In discussing what constitutes an exceptional case (and why the Federal Circuit’s objective + subjective standard is incorrect), Justice Sotomayor writes:

But a case presenting either subjective bad faith or exceptionally meritless claims may sufficiently set itself apart from mine-run cases to warrant a fee award.

572 U.S. ___ (2014), Slip Op. at 9.  Perhaps you’re all snickering, but I had no idea what “mine-run” meant so I went and looked it up.  (My first thought was that it had something to do with Minecraft, but I knew that couldn’t possibly be right.)  In the interests of sharing my new-found enlightenment, here’s the definition from Meriam-Webster Online:

1:  the unsorted product of a mine
2:  a product of common or average grade <the mine-run of commercial breads pall with continued eating — Lee Anderson>
The term “mine-run” turns out to be quite popular in recent Supreme Court opinions, appearing in 34 since 2000 (and only 5 in the two centuries before that based on my Westlaw search), although there’s no consensus on whether the term is “mine-run” or “mine run.”
This got me to thinking about other somewhat-Delphic references that the Justices have used in their patent law opinions.  (Or at least, esoteric to me).  The one that immediately comes to mind is the Court’s periodic reference to candles and games, which popped up most recently in FTC v. Actavis.  I’m not planning on doing an exhaustive search, but I suspect there are others.

Guest Post: Defend Trade Secrets Act — A Primer, an Endorsement, and a Criticism

Patent, Trade Secret, , , ,

Guest Post by David S. Almeling, a partner in the San Francisco office of O’Melveny & Myers LLP. Almeling specializes in patent and trade secret litigation.

It’s been an exciting month for trade secret law. Senators Christopher Coons (D-Delaware) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced the Defend Trade Secrets Act, a bill that would, for the first time, provide a federal right of civil action for trade secret theft. And the Judiciary Committee held a hearing during which speakers expressed support for the DTSA, including Eli Lilly’s VP and General Patent Counsel, Douglas Norman, who stated that the DTSA “will establish the gold standard for national trade secret laws globally.”

The DTSA is a game changer. If enacted, it would constitute the most dramatic rethinking of trade secret law since 1979, when the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws approved a model statute called the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Since then, 48 states have adopted the UTSA in some form, replacing their common-law regimes with statutory ones.

The DTSA isn’t perfect — I’ll explain why in a moment — but it’s the best bill of its kind introduced to date, and it should be enacted.

A Primer

The DTSA authorizes a trade secret owner to bring a civil cause of action in federal court for either (1) a violation of the Economic Espionage Act, which criminalized certain types of trade secret misappropriation, or (2) a “misappropriation of a trade secret that is related to a product or service used in, or intended for use in, interstate or foreign commerce.” The DTSA’s definition of misappropriation tracks closely the UTSA’s definition.

The DTSA would also:

Grant courts the power to issue ex parte orders “for the preservation of evidence” and “for the seizure of any property used…to commit” the alleged misappropriation. This is similar to the relief available under the Lanham Act for counterfeit goods.

Allow courts to award injunctions; damages for actual loss or unjust enrichment; a reasonable royalty “in lieu of damages”; exemplary damages up to treble the amount of compensatory damages, as opposed to the UTSA, which permits courts to award only double damages; and attorneys’ fees.

Establish a five-year statute of limitations, two years longer than the UTSA’s provision.

Decline to preempt any other law.

An Endorsement

The DTSA is not the first bill in recent years to propose a federal cause of action for trade secret theft.

Other recent efforts include: Senator Coons’s prior bills in 2011 and 2012; the proposal by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the Silicon Valley–based Democrat, to enact PRATSA (Private Right of Action Against Theft of Trade Secrets Act of 2013); and the 2013 introduction of FAIR (Future of American Innovation and Research Act) by Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. These attempts all failed, never making it out of committee.

The reasons they fell short varied; I won’t rehash them here. But the DTSA is the most comprehensive bill to date, as it addresses a broad swath of trade secret theft and encompasses a robust range of remedies.

The DTSA is better than the current system — one in which each state has its own autonomous civil trade secret law. Today, 48 states have enacted some form of the UTSA, with New Jersey (in 2012) and Texas (in 2013) being the latest adherents. New York and Massachusetts are the only remaining holdouts.

Despite the UTSA’s widespread adoption, the “U” — Uniform — hasn’t lived up to its name. State legislatures often modify the UTSA. And even if every state enacted the same UTSA, there would still be a patchwork because state courts often issue different interpretations of the same UTSA provision.

Trade secret owners, employees, and others in the knowledge economy incur the costs of this state-by-state approach. Facing different laws in different states, they are left to deal with the resulting complications that come with attempts to comply with each state’s laws. And once a dispute arises, these differences also impose costs on courts and litigants, who wage needless battles over forum shopping and choice of law. A federal statute would eliminate these differences and achieve other benefits, such as easing nationwide service of process and discovery.

This isn’t the first time I’ve endorsed some form of a federal trade secret statute. I did so in a 30-page law review article in 2009 and in a five-page Law 360 article in 2013.

I’m not alone in my support of a federal trade secret statute generally and the DTSA specifically. Senator Coons’s April 29, 2014 press release notes that the DTSA has the backing of the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and dozens of companies, including 3M, GE, Microsoft, and P&G. The AIPLA’s Trade Secret Law Committee recently voted to endorse the DTSA (disclaimer: I was one of the voting members). And other organizations, including the ABA’s IP Section and the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, announced support for some form of a federal trade secrets act in 2013.

A Criticism

Where the DTSA stumbles is in its promise not to “preempt any other provision of law.” This causes two problems.

First, the need for the DTSA stems in part from state-by-state variations in trade secret laws and the transactional and substantive problems that such variations impose. The DTSA leaves those variations in place. Worse, the DTSA adds another law to the already cluttered landscape of 48 UTSA states (with their variations), two non-UTSA states, the federal Economic Espionage Act, and a federal common trade secret law.

Second, the DTSA opens a backdoor to common-law and other causes of action that are precluded in most states. The UTSA “displaces tort, restitutionary, and other laws…providing civil remedies for misappropriation of a trade secret.” The DTSA doesn’t displace anything.

Under the DTSA, trade secret plaintiffs would have the option of pursuing their claim in state or federal court and, if they choose federal court, the additional option of asserting duplicative causes of actions that aren’t available in state courts.

Why I Still Endorse the DTSA

Trade secrets are the only major type of intellectual property (i.e., copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets) not governed primarily by a federal statute. Copyrights and patents got theirs in the 1700s. Trademark got its in the 1800s. Now that we’re firmly in the information age, it’s time for trade secrets to join their peers.

True, the DTSA is only a partial step toward uniformity, as it leaves the current state-law regime in place and doesn’t preempt overlapping causes of action. But in the absence of a complete transition from a state-based trade secret regime to a federal one, the DTSA is an important step in the right direction.

This post by David S. Almeling does not purport to represent the views of O’Melveny or its clients.

Trade Secret Subject Matter Eligibility

Patent, Trade Secret,

By Dennis Crouch

While the U.S. Supreme Court contemplates its most recent case on patent subject matter eligibility, a California appellate court has just decided a case on trade secret subject matter eligibility – finding that ideas are protectable under California trade secret laws, but that the protectable information must be sufficiently specific and secret. Altavion, Inc. v. Konica Minolta Systems Laboratory Inc., — Cal.Rptr.3d —-, 2014 WL 1846104 (Cal.App. 1 Dist. 2014). Oddly, KMSL’s MoFo attorneys argued (without citation to precedent) that “[g]eneralized ideas and inventions are protectable by patents and thus cannot be trade secrets.” That argument was soundly rejected by the Altavion court, who held instead that a trade secret can include “any unpatented idea which may be used for industrial and commercial purposes.” Quoting Sinclair v. Aquarius Electronics, Inc., 42 Cal.App.3d 216 (1974). This follows the general and longstanding principle that an inventor may choose to keep her idea as a trade secret rather than file for patent protection. “[I]f a patentable idea is kept secret, the idea itself can constitute information protectable by trade secret law.” In particular, the court here upheld the trade secret rights to “design concepts” such as process flows and conceptual methods that were not tied to any particular product or software.

In trade secret law, subject matter eligibility often begins with the notion it can be “any information” that confers some economic benefit on its holder by virtue of being kept secret and is the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain secrecy. One limit on the scope of trade secret rights is that the secret must be described “with sufficient particularity to separate it from matters of general knowledge in the trade or of special knowledge of those persons who are skilled in the trade, and to permit [an accused infringer] to ascertain at least the boundaries within which the secret lies.” Diodes, Inc. v. Franzen 260 Cal.App.2d 244 (1968).

Of the various forms of alleged trade secret misappropriation, two scenarios are likely most common. The first involves former employees who join competitor firms and share secret information with their new employers. The second involves secret information shared with partner firms or potential affiliates who then abuse their relationship to unduly profit from the information. A common theme with both of these scenarios is a preexisting relationship between the trade secret holder and the alleged wrongdoer. That relationship is often bound by a contract that speaks specifically to rights and duties associated with secret information. Thus, in these cases, the same action that appears as trade secret misappropriation is often a breach of contract as well. Regarding this contract-law phenomenon, the court here started its decision with a quote of Mark Lemley’s 2008 article on trade secret law:

Trade secret protection promotes the sharing of knowledge, and the efficient operation of industry by permitting the individual inventor to reap the rewards of his labor by contracting with a company large enough to develop and exploit it. Trade secret law allows the inventor to disclose an idea in confidential commercial negotiations certain that the other side will not appropriate it without compensation. The holder of the secret, may disclose information he would otherwise have been unwilling to share, and this permits business negotiations that can lead to commercialization of the invention or sale of the idea, serving both the disclosure and incentive functions of intellectual property law.

Lemley, The Surprising Virtues of Treating Trade Secrets as IP Rights, 61 Stan. L.Rev. 311 (quotations and citations omitted).

The story of this case began with Altavion’s idea for “digital stamping technology” involving bar-codes that include encrypted information about the contents of the underlying document being stamped. Altavion disclosed the idea to KMSL – Konica Minolta’s research subsidiary – as part of a failed negotiation between the companies. That negotiation was, however, governed by a non-disclosure agreement agreed-to by KMSL. Later, Altavion learned that KMSL had filed twenty four separate patent applications on digital stamping technology stemming from the Altavion idea. Altavion, on the other hand, had decided to keep its idea as a trade secret.

Following a bench trial, the district court found that KMSL had misappropriated the Altavision trade secret and awarded $1.5 million in damages and $3.2 million in attorney fees. The trial court found that KMSL “had no idea, interest or information about DST … or use of bar codes prior to their dealings with [Altavion].” On appeal, that decision has now been affirmed.

In its appeal, KMSL argues that the lower court’s protection of digital stamping technology as a trade secret was improper and that, instead, the lower court should have focused on the particular and specific algorithms and software concepts that Altavion had created. The court agreed with this, in-part, but responded by dividing the claimed information into three tiers grouped according to both their specificity and secrecy.

The least specific and least secret level of information is Altavion’s general idea for a barcode allowing for self-authentication of documents with identification of alterations. This level of information is not a protectable trade secret because the general idea was disclosed to other companies without the benefit of an NDA. At the other extreme, the most specific and secret level of information is Altavion’s algorithms and source code that execute Altavion’s DST. Such information is unquestionably protectable by trade secret law, but it could not form the basis for Altavion’s misappropriation claim because Altavion did not share its algorithms and source codes with KMSL.

The middle tier of information is comprised of the design concepts that underlie Altavion’s DST, many of which might be evident to a software end user. There is no evidence such information was disclosed to anyone other than KMSL, pursuant to an NDA, and, thus, misappropriation of these secret design concepts (separately and in combination) provide a basis for Altavion’s claim.

Here, the court finds “design concepts” – similar to what are found in patent drawings – to be protectable trade secrets.

Read the court decision here: Altavion

For further background on this topic, readers may want to read: Andrew Schwartz, THE CORPORATE PREFERENCE FOR TRADE SECRET, 74 Ohio St. L.J. 623 (2013) (arguing that, where protectable, corporations should prefer trade secret protection over patent protection)