Legislation

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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…

After being removed to federal district court last May, the Vermont Attorney General’s suit against non-practicing entity MPHJ is being sent back to state court. The decision holds that the AG’s unfair competition claims arising from MPHJ’s patent enforcement efforts belong in state court and raises the question of whether other patent demand letter jurisprudence …

Hopefully the current patent reform effort to address perceived patent litigation abuse problems will result in carefully targeted tweaks to–without harming–our otherwise thriving U.S. patent system, the greatest system for innovation that the world has ever known (see our Patent Forest post).  The Senate is currently considering this balance.  The Senate Judiciary Committee was…

As we discussed in a prior post, the U.S. Senate is currently debating a patent reform bill (“the Innovation Act”) passed by the House of Representatives late last year directed to perceived patent litigation abuse by certain patent assertion entities (what some characterize as “patent trolls”).  The Senate is also debating a competing bill…

Last week, the Virginia General Assembly joined the state legislatures of Oregon and Vermont by approving legislation designed to protect entities doing business in Virginia from bad faith assertions of patent infringement.  While Virginia lawmakers tout the bill as targeting non-practicing entities (characterized by some as “patent trolls”), the text of the bill appears to…

Yesterday patent monetization entity MPHJ filed a Complaint in W.D. Tex. against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for threatening an enforcement action against MPHJ premised on MPHJ’s extensive letter campaign to accumulate license fees on its scanner patents by threatening small end-users with litigation that MPHJ allegedly did not actually intend to pursue.  We…

Last Thursday, December 5, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3309 (“the Innovation Act”), a patent reform bill generally directed to perceived patent litigation abuse by certain patent assertion entities (what some call “patent trolls”).  Prior draft versions of the House bill had gone through several revisions in the past few months (see our September…

Yesterday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Committee member Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced another patent reform measure called the Patent Transparency and Improvements Act of 2013, including a press release, section-by-section summary of the proposed legislation and legislation text.  This joins other currently considered patent reform legislation such as that…