Plug

  • Shameless plug alert – this past Friday saw us quoted in media reports about patent litigation:
    • The Wall Street Journal‘s article “ITC Clears Microsoft’s Xbox in Patent Case,” which discussed recent goings-on in the Motorola-Microsoft ITC case, featured a quote from David Long.  You may recall that this case, which is part of the worldwide Microsoft-Motorola dispute, used to involve several standard-essential patents, but Motorola withdrew them from the case in January after entering into the consent decree with the FTC.
  • Last week we noted the Supreme Court’s decision in Kirsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons and the potential effect it could have on the patent exhaustion doctrine.  As noted by Patently-O and others, then, it was somewhat of a surprise to see the Court yesterday deny a petition for a writ of certiorari in Ninestar Tech Co. v. U.S. Int’l Trade Comm’n, where Ninestar was challenging the Federal Circuit’s denial of patent exhaustion in the international context.  Many had expected the Supreme Court to either grant certiorari outright or to grant, vacate, and remand the case to the Federal Circuit.  (For some background on international patent exhaustion, see this article by Hal Wegner.)
  • Application developers are increasingly being targeted in patent infringement suits, particularly by non-practicing entities.  As reported by TechDirt, the Application Developers Alliance is putting together a series of app developer patent summits, which will take place over the next several months in various locations around the country.