RANDomness

By Essential Patent Blog on August 12, 2013

Posted in RANDomness

On Friday, the U.S. International Trade Commission issued a Notice of a Final Determination and issuance of a Limited Exclusion Order and Cease and Desist Order against Samsung in Inv. No. 337-TA-796, finding that Samsung infringed two Apple patents relating to multi-touch functionality and headphone jack input/output detection. (The ITC cleared Samsung of allegations relating to several other Apple patents, including a couple of design patents — no standard-essential patents were at issue in this case.) You can read more on this ruling from Bloomberg.
In other news from the Apple-Samsung front, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held oral arguments on Friday (audio link here) concerning Apple’s appeal of the denial of a permanent injunction in last year’s district court between the two parties (in which Apple won a sizeable damages award). We attended the hour-long arguments here in DC, which centered around District Judge Lucy Koh’s conclusion that Apple failed to demonstrate a “causal nexus” between Samsung’s infringement and the alleged irreparable harm suffered by Apple. More on this case — the outcome of which could have vast implications for remedies in many, many patent cases — from Bloomberg as well, and Groklaw also has a nice round-up of news reports as well as an eyewitness report.
Over at Patently-O, Dennis Crouch provides us with an interesting case history of the Versata-SAP saga, which has resulted in both a nine-figure damages award and an invalidation of the patent in the USPTO’s first Covered Business Method review.
The Washington Post brings us the story of The Coalition for Patent Fairness, a “big tent” group that has evolved over the years from lobbying for tech companies to fighting for patent reform on behalf of a wide variety of entities. (via The Washington Post).
Lastly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently launched a website called Trolling Effects, which seeks to bring transparency to licensing demands made by patent assertion entities. Companies that receive demand letters from PAEs can submit these documents to the EFF, which will publish them on the site for all to see.