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Today Judge Whyte issued his awaited post-trial rulings following the jury’s RAND determination on LSI’s IEEE 802.11 WiFi patents in which he (1) denied JMOL motions by  both Realtek and LSI, (2) ruled on Realtek’s injunction and declaratory relief requests by denying Realtek’s request to enjoin LSI from seeking to enforce RAND-obligated patents without first…

Magistrate Judge Grewal in N.D. Cal. recently issued an Order excluding the testimony of Golden Bridge Technology’s damages expert because it was based on a flawed methodology for determing a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) royalty rate for the asserted patent alleged to be essential to the 3GPP WCDMA standard.  The primary problem appears to…

Judge Richard Andrews of the District Court of Delaware dismissed Nokia and ZTE’s amended FRAND counterclaims against InterDigital on Wednesday, ruling that the amended declaratory judgment actions would not serve a useful purpose in the context of the parties’ ongoing litigation. Nokia and ZTE’s FRAND counterclaims involve around 500 patents identified to ETSI as possibly…

Last week, Magistrate Judge Grewal in N.D. Cal. denied Apple’s motion for summary judgment that patent owner Golden Bridge Technology was precluded from seeking pre-suit damages due to its alleged failure to comply with the marking statute.  Apple’s summary judgment argument was premised on Golden Bridge’s failure to mark the alleged SEP’s patent number on…

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two opinions (Octane Fitness and Highmark) that create a more flexible, deferential standard for determining what constitutes an “exceptional” patent case in which a district court has discretion to award reasonable attorney’s fees to the prevailing party.  The Court rejected the Federal Circuit’s rigid test that required…

With standard-essential-patent (SEP) damages discussions frequently focused on how to calculate a RAND rate, one can sometimes forget that not all SEPs are subject to [F]RAND obligations, which raises the issue whether and to what extent a reasonable royalty rate would be different between RAND and non-RAND encumbered patents. Last week, N.D. Cal. Judge Lucy…

As the Senate continues to weigh patent reform measures focused on improving preliminary disclosures in patent litigation, courts continue to distinguish between sufficient and insufficient disclosures under their own patent local rules. According to a recent ruling from the Northern District of California, a generalized claim that any products practicing a technical standard infringe an…

Yesterday, a Florida jury returned a verdict that BlackBerry did not infringe NXP’s patents alleged to be essential to the IEEE 802.11 WiFi and JEDEC eMMC standards and that the asserted patent claims were invalid.  The role of BlackBerry’s standard essential patent defenses is not clear from the record, though it appears to have been…

In the midst of ongoing congressional efforts at patent litigation reform (see Monday’s post for the most recent developments), U.S. District Court Judge Sue Robinson released a new scheduling order on Monday, directed to better managing the hundreds of patent cases before her in the District of Delaware. Resulting from “the lively and informative discussions”…

Non-practicing entity US Ethernet Innovation’s (“USEI”) infringement action against Samsung was brought to a close last Friday, with E.D. Tex. Judge Michael H. Schneider granting the parties’ joint motion for dismissal with prejudice. USEI filed this action against Samsung and peripheral printing device manufacturer OKI Data Americas on June 22, 2012, alleging that certain OKI…