IP Litigator articles from January 2005

IP Litigator archives from January 2005

Overview of patent litigation.
January 1, 2005... In many respects, patent litigation is similar to other commercial litigation, particularly complex civil litigation; in other respects, however, it is different--quite different. (1) This article summarizes the key patent laws and outlines...

Enforcing intellectual property rights north of the border: a Canadian perspective.
January 1, 2005... When Is It Necessary to Enforce Outside the United States? There is a natural tendency among US based rights owners and their attorneys to want to bring suit in the United States to enforce rights. There are several reasons for this. For...

Reexamination as a limited alternative to litigation. (patent litigation)
January 1, 2005... Historically, patent litigation has ranked among the most expensive types of litigation. Congress has listened and experimented with several types of administrative proceedings before the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in...

Federal Circuit 2004: eight significant patent law developments every IP litigator must understand.(intellectual property)
January 1, 2005... In comparison to prominent courts in other fields of law, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issues decisions that impact the conduct of patent litigation at a "lightning pace." (1) In its capacity as the court of last resort for...

Java gets put in a yellow (Kodak).(Eastman Kodak Co. v. Sun Microsystems)(New York)
January 1, 2005... In Eastman Kodak Company v. Sun Microsystems. [CV No. 02-6074T(F), WD NY, September 2004], Eastman Kodak Company (Kodak) won the liability phase and settled with Sun for $92 million dollars after a jury found that certain portions or modules...

Bright line or bum rap? The Sixth Circuit holds that digital sampling infringes the Copyright Act.(Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films)
January 1, 2005... Musical compositions have always been protected by federal copyright. But sound recordings, the embodiment of those compositions in a recorded performance, were not given federal copyright protection until the 1971 amendments to the Copyright...

A series of inventor compensation claims in Japan.
January 1, 2005... The recent surge of pro-patent policies throughout Japan pushed the Japanese court to award 7.4 billion yen damages (about 860 million) for patent infringement in 2000. [Reported in IP Litigator, March/April 2003, Vol. 9, No.3, p. 38.] This...

Claim construction and dictionaries - where are we now?
January 1, 2005... There is little doubt among patent litigators that claim construction--the interpretation of patent claims during prosecution--often is case determinative. [E.g., Genzyme Corp. v. Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc. 346 F.3d 1094, 1097 (Fed. Cir....

Third Circuit clarifies standard to obtain ex parte seizure of counterfeit goods.
January 1, 2005... In 1991, the Third Circuit issued a valuable ruling for trademark owners fighting the sale of counterfeit goods, finding that a district court had erred when it refused to award an ex parte seizure order against street vendors selling...