07.01.16
A System in Their Back Pockets: Protecting Large Corporations in High-Profile Patent Cases
Whose pockets are deepest? When the USPTO is run by people from Google and from IBM…
Summary: A couple of new examples of patent cases where the bigger company (with deeper pockets) wins, either by injunctions against small companies or by invalidating the patents of smaller companies
“The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday,” according to Reuters, “refused to review a case involving the cancellation of a Versata Inc patent that had previously been the subject of a $345 million jury verdict against enterprise software maker SAP SE.”
“By deciding not to take up the case, the Supreme Court left intact a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirming the patent’s invalidation, which Versata said casts too wide a net in categorizing patents as financial in nature.”
–ReutersThe US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), by refusing to step in, does not put at danger decisions such as Alice, which is probably what we want. This is about CAFC ruling against patents. To quote Reuters: “By deciding not to take up the case, the Supreme Court left intact a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirming the patent’s invalidation, which Versata said casts too wide a net in categorizing patents as financial in nature.”
In other news, in light of the Cisco v Arista case (covered here before), Arista is complaining [1, 2, 3]. “The International Trade Commission issued a limited exclusion order and cease and desist order for Arista infringing three patents in an investigation brought by Cisco Systems relating to ethernet switch products,” MIP summarised. The ITC’s build-in bias is a subject we tackled here before. █