- Last week we discussed some of the SEP-related comments submitted to the FTC and DOJ in response to their December 2012 Patent Assertion Entity Workshop. Building on these and the myriad other comments surrounding PAEs/NPEs, Tom Ewing — the attorney who coined the term “patent privateering” — sets forth a 12-point plan that he asserts can be used to investigate and target NPE activity (via ANewDomain.net)
- In other PAE/NPE news, one particular company — Rackspace Hosting — is not only apparently fed up with PAE activities, but it is willing to put its proverbial money where its mouth is:
- It recently won a motion to dismiss invaliding a Uniloc patent in the Eastern District of Texas, and also filed a Petition for Inter Partes Review at the USPTO to challenge the validity of a patent held by NPE Rotatable Technologies.
- Earlier this month, Rackspace filed a lawsuit for breach of contract against PAEs Parallel Iron and IP Navigation Group (IPNav), then detailed its motivations for doing so in a blog post. According to Rackspace, IPNav and Parallel Iron breached the terms of a “litigation standstill” agreement by suing Rackspace for patent infringement. IPNav responded in a lengthy blog post of its own that the lawsuit was baseless because the agreement had expired.
- Last Friday, in a guest post at Patent Progress, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Rackspace Alan Schoenbaum urged the government to “Stop Abusive Patent Litigation, for the Sake of Our Economy.“
- The law firm of Jones Day recently published a thorough white paper on the subject of standard-essential patents and injunctive relief, examining the interplay between SEPs, the courts, and the antitrust laws both domestically and abroad. The paper is titled “Standards-Essential Patents and Injunctive Relief.“
- And in case you missed it last week, the judge presiding over the Microsoft-Motorola RAND dispute in the Western District of Washington issued an order setting a RAND royalty rate for Motorola’s 802.11- and H.264-essential patents. However, due to concerns over confidentiality, the order likely won’t become public until this coming Friday, April 25.