You are here: Home / Archives for intellectual property litigation

Litigation Funding Market Heats Up – WSJ

October 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

At least three start-up businesses are entering the fledgling “alternative litigation funding” market this year, according to this WSJ story today.

One of the new players is Bentham Capital LLC, which opened for business last Monday. It’s focusing on commercial and intellectual-property litigation, according to its chief investment officer, Ralph Sutton, a former lawyer at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams, & Sheppard. Bentham’s parent, IMF Australia Ltd., has more than 87 million Australian dollars in assets.

Another new player is John P. “Sean” Coffey, a former plaintiff lawyer at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and a former lead trial lawyer for investors in the case against Wall Street banks arising from the collapse of the former telecom company WorldCom Inc. His start-up firm is called BlackRobe Capital Partners LLC.

via Litigation Funding Market Heats Up – Law Blog – WSJ.

Filed Under: From The News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Apple iPhone Patent a Huge Blow to Rival Smartphone Makers | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

June 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Apple has been awarded its long sought-after patent on the iPhone. Intellectual property experts say it’s so broad and far-reaching that the iPhone maker may be able to bully other smart phone manufacturers out of the U.S. market entirely.

Some three-and-a-half years after filing for a patent on the iPhone, Apple on Tuesday was awarded U.S. patent number 7,966,578 for “[a] computer-implemented method, for use in conjunction with a portable multifunction device with a touch screen display, [that] comprises displaying a portion of page content, including a frame displaying a portion of frame content and also including other content of the page, on the touch screen display.”

That’s just the beginning of the abstract for Apple’s iPhone patent, which the company filed back in December 2007. It gets quite a bit more technical in its full form, but there’s one thing patent experts consulted by PCMag agree on—Apple has been awarded an incredibly broad patent that could prove to be hugely problematic for other makers of capacitive touch-screen smartphones.

View SlideshowSee all (6) slides

 

More

Apple’s patent essentially gives it ownership of the capacitive multitouch interface the company pioneered with its iPhone, said one source who has been involved in intellectual property litigation on similar matters. That’s likely to produce a new round of lawsuits over the now-ubiquitous multitouch interfaces used in smartphones made by the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola, Research in Motion, Nokia, and others that run operating systems similar in nature to Apple’s iOS, like Google’s Android, said the source, who asked not to be named.

via Apple iPhone Patent a Huge Blow to Rival Smartphone Makers | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Filed Under: Tech Bytes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Chinese, Japanese or Korean Documents Have You Perplexed?

April 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

中文，日语或朝鲜语文件有你困惑？

あなたは困惑し、中国語、日本語、韓国語のドキュメントがありますか？

당신은 당황하게 중국어, 일본어 또는 한국어 문서가 있나요?

Documents containing Chinese, Japanese and Korean (“CJK“) language and character sets have become intertwined within many different legal matters, ranging from international arbitration to  intellectual property litigation to to administrative investigations.   However, the solutions typically used to manage CJK documents have not kept pace with demand and remain slow, cumbersome and expensive.  Most firms, corporations and vendors rely on automated machine translation or certified document translations to understand CJK documents, with the first often revealing giberish results and the later often resulting in extremely high cost to the end client.

Asia Legal Technologies – a joint venture between Global EDD Group and Data Management Corporation – provides innovative custom solutions to clients with CJK document collections.  Each solution is designed to be efficient in both time and cost while leveraging specialized technology, knowledge and human resources to provide multi-lingual services.

  • Data Collection & Preservation
  • Scanning / OCR
  • E-Discovery Processing
  • Automated Language Identification
  • Standard Coding (Chinese, Japanese, Korean to English)
  • Document Summaries (Chinese, Japanese, Korean to English)
  • Translation (Machine, Hybrid, Certified)
  • Document Review

Document containing East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean no longer need to be a perplexing problem with complicated, expensive solutions.  To learn more about the multi-lingual services of Asia Legal Technologies, kindly click to AsiaLegalTech.com or email information@asialegaltech.com.

Filed Under: From The News, Global EDD Group Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Federal Circuit Ruling May Rein In Patent Re-Examinations | Law.com

April 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Patent Office relief on the Herbert C. Hoover ...
Image via Wikipedia

A federal appeals court ruling may curb the growing trend of using re-examinations to challenge other parties’ patents.

In In Re Suitco Surface Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit remanded a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejection of some claims in a patent re-examination. The PTO’s interpretation of Suitco’s patent claim for “material for finishing the top surface of the floor” was “unreasonably broad,” wrote Circuit Judge Randall Rader.

Rader noted that case law requiring the PTO to give claims “their broadest reasonable construction” does not give the PTO “an unfettered license to interpret claims to embrace anything remotely related to the claimed invention,” Rader wrote. “Rather, claims should always be read in light of the specification and teachings in the underlying patent.”

Suitco will be a frequently cited case for patent lawyers helping clients fight re-examinations, said Steven Moore, an intellectual property litigation partner in the Stamford, Conn., office of New York’s Kelley Drye & Warren, who was not involved in the case.

“It’s a fight that we all have with the patent office,” Moore said. “If it’s in your specification and you’ve used it in a particular manner, that’s what should rule, not this broadest-interpretation concept.”

Seeking a re-examination of the patent is “almost a knee jerk reaction” for defendants in patent infringement cases, he added.

“With the number of re-exams being allowed by the patent office, if you’re in litigation you almost always have a re-exam,” Moore said.

via Law.com – Federal Circuit Ruling May Rein In Patent Re-Examinations.

Filed Under: From The News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,