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Recent Cases

Industry News

IPmetrics Daily News

Press Releases

Industry News

IPmetrics LLC monitors intangible asset news, accomplishments, major publications and other newsworthy developments.  The following are the most recent and relevant press releases:

• Patently-O Blog: Comments on Lockwood v. Sheppard Mullin (Fed. Cir. 2010) an interesting case argued last week before the Federal Circuit. The focus of the appeal is whether a patentee has any cause of action for a third-party's baseless filing of a reexamination request. Read More.

• New York Times: Vintage Brand and Corporate Names to Be Auctioned.- By Stuart Elliott (November 8, 2010).- Brands USA Holdings, which has been accumulating the rights to nostalgic brand names like Handi-Wrap and Lucky Whip, plans to auction off 150 to 170 of names next month in New York. (Read More)
• Law360, New York (November 05, 2010) -- Patent damages jurisprudence is evolving at a rapid pace, both through U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit opinions such as Lucent v. Gateway and ResQNet.com v. Lansa, and federal district case law like Cornell v. Hewlett-Packard Co. and IP Innovation v. Red Hat. Courts have challenged patentees, attorneys and damages experts to more thoroughly support opinions as to the royalty rate through more sound economic proof, evidence of extent of use and precise...Read More.
• Technically Legal notes: The third installment in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case began yesterday (11/2/2010) in the district court of Minnesota. At the heart of this damages case are the “statutory damages” provisions in the Copyright Act, which lay out a spectrum of damages per instance of infringement. If the infringement is proved to be “willful,” as was the case in the Thomas-Rasset trial, the spectrum is $750 – $150,000 per instance of infringement. Since there were 24 songs at issue, that’s 24 instances of infringement. For Ms. Thomas-Rasset, this means the jury can award Capitol Records somewhere between $18,000 – $3.6 million. Read More.
• Visit the IPmetrics Daily for up to the minute IP news!
• Law360, New York (October 28, 2010) -- Chrysler Group LLC has agreed to settle its complaint accusing Chinese manufacturers and several U.S.-based distributors of infringing a patent covering the automaker's Jeep Hurricane concept vehicle. Read More.
• October 25, 2010.- IPLaw360 The Ninth Circuit federal appeals court has refused to reconsider a ruling that dramatically increases the royalties UMG Recordings Inc. must pay for digital downloads of Eminem songs on a contract that predates online music sales. Read More.
• October 18, 2010. - IPLaw360: Mattel Inc. is asking for partial summary judgment in its bitter intellectual property feud with rival toy maker MGA Entertainment Inc. Read More.
• October 14, 2010. - Damages in Mirror Worlds vs. Apple Case Could Top 1.8 Billion according to the Patently Apple Blog, considering the potential treble damages on the $208.5 million award for each of the three patents the jury found Apple had "willfully infringed."  Read More. 
• October 14, 2010. - IPLaw360: In a two-page order Wednesday, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a July decision by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois refusing to grant an injunction blocking Nike from continuing to sell  its "Pro Combat" line of college football uniforms. Read More.  
• October 11, 2010. - Bloomberg reports that the ownership of the Stolichnaya trademark is in question following a ruling Oct. 8 by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The three-judge panel reversed a lower court ruling that found that the trademark was “incontestable.”  Representing the Russian agency that brought the case, the Federal Treasury Enterprise Sojuzplodoimport, is Quinn Emanual Urquhart & Sullivan. Partner David W. Quinto said that the Stolichnaya trademarks had been “hijacked” following the breakup of the Soviet Union and it “took quite awhile to figure out who was entitled to what.” Read More
• October 4, 2010. - Ars Technica reports "Apple has been ordered to pay more than $200 million to Mirror Worlds, LLC after having lost a patent infringement case brought by the company. Apple was found to be in violation of Mirror Worlds' "document streaming" patents, which Apple allegedly used in its implementation of Cover Flow and Time Machine.  
  Mirror Worlds brought the lawsuit against Apple in 2008, accusing the company of infringing on four patents, three of which covered a "document stream operating system." The fourth patent extended the other three, describing an information management system based on the document streams.
  The document streams outlined in the patents would contain many different types of documents with a similar theme, and would be organized in chronological order and displayed in a pile. Sound a lot like Cover Flow and Time Machine? That's because it is. Anyone who's familiar with the visual document layout of those two technologies knows that they use the same concept: visually displaying documents in a pile that you can scroll through." Read More.

• Los Angeles | Tue Sep 28, 2010 4:09pm EDT (Reuters) - News Corp's Fox, Walt Disney Co's ABC, CBS and several other broadcasters on Tuesday sued tiny upstart online subscription service Ivi for offering TV shows on the Internet without permission. The case is WPIX Inc v. Ivi Inc, 10-7415, Southern District of New York. Read More
• Law360, New York (September 24, 2010) -- The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has confirmed the patentability of most claims of a patent for gift card technology asserted by Card Activation Technologies Inc. against numerous major retailers, according to the company. Card Activation said in a statement Thursday that the USPTO had issued a re-examination certificate for U.S. Patent Number 6,032,859, which the company has asserted in numerous suits. Read More
• September 23, 2010 - The US Supreme Court is weighing in on the first RIAA file sharing case to reach its docket, requesting that the music labels’ litigation arm respond to a case testing the so-called “innocent infringer” defense to copyright infringement. Read More at Ars Technica.
• September 20, 2010 - Alleged Confusion Over Mark Not Enough to Prevail in latest Google Keyword Case  to go on trial (Jurin v. Google, Inc., 2010 WL 3521955, No. 09-3065 [E.D. Calif. Sept. 8, 2010] ). Read more on the blog post by Michael Atkins.
• September 8, 2010 - One of the first consequences of the Supreme Court having affirmed the the USPTO's denial to grant the now famous 'Bilski' business method patent is the dismissal of the suits brought before the Southern District of NY by Vraspon Trading Inc. against the NASDAQ OMX Group and NYSE Euronext, among others (See, e.g., the complaint vs. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.). The suits alleged the infringement of a patent of a process for calculating an expiration-less option (US#6,263,321). Ultimately,  the dismissal hinged on the SCOTUS decision, and it essentially confirms you cannot patent the idea of solving a well known equation for a different variable, even if it is complex and you use a computer to do it; it is simply not patentable subject matter.

• For older news items, see the Industry News Archive.