Justia Patents Opinion Summaries

MadStad sought a declaratory judgment that the “first-inventor-to-file” provision of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) was unconstitutional and a permanent injunction barring its enforcement. Before the AIA, the PTO typically gave priority to the first to invent; under the AIA priority goes to the first inventor to file a patent application. The named inventor must have invented the invention independently and not derived the idea from another, 35 U.S.C. 102. The district court dismissed for lack of standing. The Federal Circuit affirmed. For MadStad to actually suffer any injury fairly traceable to the AIA, an “acutely attenuated concatenation of events” was required. MadStad failed to prove that any injury was actual or imminent. View "MadStad Eng'g, Inc. v. U.S. Patent & Trademark Office" on Justia Law

An antibody is a protein that binds to a foreign substance, called an antigen, to facilitate its removal from the body, and is useful in treating diseases. AbbVie owns patents directed to genetically engineered fully human antibodies that bind to and neutralize the activity of human interleukin 12 (IL-12), a signaling protein secreted by the human body, the overproduction of which can cause psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis. Because the human body does not typically make antibodies to neutralize its own proteins, it does not produce IL-12 antibodies naturally. Antibodies from a non-human species can cause adverse immune reactions in humans. The AbbVie patents share the same written description and claim priority from a provisional application filed in 1999; they describe the amino acid sequence of about 300 antibodies having a range of IL-12 binding affinities. AbbVie sued for infringement and the defendants sought interference review under 35 U.S.C. 146. The district court entered judgments of invalidity in both the infringement and the interference actions. The Federal Circuit affirmed; all of the asserted claims are invalid for failing to satisfy the written description requirement. View "AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. v. Janssen Biotech, Inc." on Justia Law

The patents, which claim priority to the same parent application, are directed to systems and methods for enabling hospital staff to remotely monitor the status of hospital beds and disclose hospital beds equipped with sensors that monitor bed parameters, such as the patient’s presence in the bed and the bed height. The systems send data about the status of a hospital bed to a remote location for monitoring. Hill-Rom sued Stryker alleging infringement of various claims. The parties stipulated to non-infringement based on the court’s construction of the claim terms “datalink,” “interface board including a processor,” “message validation information,” and “bed condition message.” The Federal Circuit reversed and remanded, based on erroneous construction of the terms. View "Hill-Rom Services, Inc. v. Stryker Corp." on Justia Law

CEATS filed a patent infringement suit against airlines and ticket agencies. After the parties failed to reach a settlement during court ordered mediation, a jury found that CEATS’s patents were infringed, but invalid. The Federal Circuit affirmed the finding of invalidity. While its first appeal was pending, CEATS filed sought relief from the judgment under FRCP 60(b) based on an alleged relationship between the court-appointed mediator and the law firm representing most of the accused infringers. The alleged relationship was brought to light in the unrelated Karlseng litigation. The district court denied CEATS’s Rule 60(b) motion. The Federal Circuit affirmed, stating that it disagreed with the district court’s finding that the mediator had no duty to disclose his dealings with one of the firms involved in the litigation, but that the three “Liljeberg factors” did not establish that this case presents an “extraordinary circumstance” where relief from judgment is warranted View "CEATS, Inc. v. Cont'l Airlines, Inc." on Justia Law

Defendant appealed the district court's remand to state court. Plaintiff moved to dismiss the case. At issue was whether the district court has jurisdiction over an inventorship dispute where the contested patent has not yet been issued. The court concluded that, regardless of whether the removed complaint included an inventorship dispute, that dispute was inadequate to establish the district court's jurisdiction because the allegations indicated that no patent had issued; by raising a timely objection to removal, plaintiff properly preserved its jurisdictional argument; and because removal was improper and the case had not yet been tried on the merits, binding precedent dictated that the court remand the case to state court. Accordingly, the court affirmed the district court's remand order as amended and dismissed plaintiff's motion and cross-motion. View "Camsoft Data Sys., Inc. v. Southern Electronics Supply, et al." on Justia Law

Augme sued Yahoo! alleging infringement of certain claims of two patents that disclose adding functionality, such as media or advertisements, to a web page. Yahoo! counterclaimed that Augme and World Talk Radio infringed certain claims of its patent. After claim construction, the court granted Yahoo! summary judgment of noninfringement and held that certain means-plus-function terms in claims 19 and 20 of Augme’s patent were indefinite. The parties stipulated to infringement of the asserted claims of Yahoo!’s patent based on the court’s claim construction. The Federal Circuit affirmed that Yahoo!’s accused systems do not infringe the Augme patents either literally or under the doctrine of equivalents and that certain claims are indefinite. The court also upheld the district court’s construction of the claim term “server hostname.”View "Augme Techs, Inc. v. Yahoo! Inc." on Justia Law

The 317, 485, and 727 patents (owned by Gemalto) derive priority from the same provisional patent application and share the same named inventors, specification, and title: “Using a High Level Programming Language with a Microcontroller.” The patented technology is designed to allow resource-constrained devices, including microcontrollers, to run software applications (or programs) written in high level programming languages, such as Java. According to Gemalto, its invention enabled resource-constrained devices to run applications written in high level programming languages (such as Java) by minimizing the computing resources that applications consumed during storage and execution. Gemalto sued for infringement, alleging that the defendants’ smartphones infringe when they run the Android operating system and Java applications (converted using the Android software development kit). The defendants contended that the accused smartphones do not infringe because they are not resource-constrained devices, but rely on off-chip memory to run Java applications, similar to prior art personal computers. The district court construed the asserted claims and granted summary judgment of non-infringement, concluding that the accused products did not infringe literally or under the doctrine of equivalents. The Federal Circuit affirmed.View "Gemalto S.A. v. HTC Corp." on Justia Law

Triton sued Nintendo alleging that the Wii Remote™ used in combination with an accessory infringes the 181 patent, which covers a computer input device. It discloses that a user can communicate with a computer by moving the device in three dimensions. The device sends commands to the computer based on its three-dimensional position, orientation, and motion. In the preferred embodiment, its components include three accelerometers and three rotational rate sensors for measuring linear acceleration along, and rotational velocity about, three orthogonal axes. This embodiment also includes a conventional microprocessor that is programmed to periodically read and numerically integrate over time digitized acceleration and rotational rate values to calculate the position, orientation, and motion values for the input device. The patent does not further explain how the numerical integration is performed, only that it is performed in a “conventional manner.” Each claim recites an “integrator means.” The district court held that this term rendered the claims indefinite, holding that the corresponding structure for performing the recited integrating function was a “conventional microprocessor having a suitably programmed read-only memory.” It found that the patent did not disclose any algorithm for performing the recited integrating function, stating that the patent broadly discloses using “numerical integration,” but that this alone was not a sufficient disclosure because “‘[n]umerical integration’ ... is not a single algorithm, but rather a whole class of algorithms that can be used to calculate definite integrals. The Federal Circuit affirmed. . View "Triton Tech of TX, LLC v. Nintendo of Am, Inc." on Justia Law

BMS owns the 244 patent and markets a drug for the treatment of hepatitis B. Claim 8 of the patent is directed to a nucleoside analog composed of two regions: a carbocyclic ring and a guanine base. Nucleoside analogs are manmade compounds designed to mimic the activity of natural nucleosides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. These compounds are modified slightly from their natural counterparts to interfere with the replication of viral DNA—which means that they can serve as possible antiviral compounds. Claim 8 covers one such compound, entecavir. BMS markets entecavir as a treatment for hepatitis B, under the trade name Baraclude®. In an infringement case, the district court found claim 8 invalid as obvious. The Federal Circuit affirmed, noting that three other drugs for treating hepatitis B were invented before the filing date of entecavir; that the three drugs also gained FDA approval before entecavir; and that entecavir’s inventors did not know about its hepatitis B properties until four years after the filing date, and by then the first FDA-approved hepatitis B treatment was launched. View "Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Teva Pharm. USA, Inc." on Justia Law

The patents at issue involve a 0.03% bimatoprost ophthalmic solution that can is effective as eye drops to treat glaucoma, by alleviating intraocular pressure, or to promote hair growth. The 029 patent was assigned to Duke University and issued in 2008. The 404 patent, assigned to Allergan. Apotex submitted Abbreviated New Drug Applications (ANDAs) to the FDA seeking to market a generic version of Allergan’s Latisse® product, which treats hair loss. Allergan and Duke filed suit. In a consolidated Hatch-Waxman action, the district court held that the asserted claims of the 029 and 404 patents are not invalid for anticipation, obviousness, insufficient written description, or lack of enablement, and that Apotex infringed the patents. The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s claim construction that a method of “treating hair loss” may include a method of promoting hair growth without also arresting or reversing hair loss; that that in this case a previous disclosure was too sparse and ambiguous for a person of ordinary skill to comprehend as anticipating the 029 patent; and that the 819 patent does not inherently anticipate the claims of the 029 patent, but reversed findings that asserted claims of the 029 and 404 patents are non-obvious and that the 404 patent was conceived prior to the date of publication of the2001 Brandt references. View "Allergan, Inc. v. Apotex Inc." on Justia Law