- A couple weeks back, we noted a bid by Cisco, Motorola Solutions, and NETGEAR to expedite an appeal of their unsuccessful unfair competition claims against non-practicing entity Innovatio IP Ventures LLC. At a status hearing yesterday, however, Chief Judge James F. Holderman of the Northern District of Illinois denied the parties’ motion for entry of final judgment — so the WiFi suppliers will have to wait a bit longer to see if they can revive these claims.
- Cisco, Motorola Solutions, and NETGEAR aren’t the only ones advocating using unfair competition/antitrust claims to fight NPEs. Over at Patent Progress, Brendan Coffman proposes that the Federal Trade Commission utilize Section 6(b) of the FTC Act to conduct a study on the business models of non-practicing entities. Google, BlackBerry, Red Hat, and Earthlink submitted joint comments to the FTC and DOJ that also encouraged a 6(b) study (as well as the use of other antitrust tools). Links to the dozens of other comments submitted to the FTC and DOJ in response to their December 2012 Patent Assertion Entities Workshop — many of which call for increased antitrust scrutiny of NPEs — can be found here.
- It’s not uncommon for universities to assert patent infringement claims against operating companies. Recently, Carnegie Mellon won a $1B+ infringement verdict against Marvell Semiconductor. It seems that at least one operating company has found an interesting way of fighting back. In 2011, the University of Illinois sued Micron Technology for patent infringement over certain semiconductor-related patents. As Patently-O’s Dennis Crouch explains, Micron has now told the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that it will no longer recruit UIUC students while Micron is being sued for patent infringement by the university.
