IP Newsflash

The Eastern District of Texas recently addressed two significant issues related to fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) negotiations under French law; namely, whether: (1) an implementer is entitled to damages resulting from a standard essential patent (SEP) holder’s bad faith; and (2) an SEP holder can unilaterally discharge its FRAND obligations in view of an implementer’s bad faith.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board recently instituted an inter partes review where the patent owner argued that the petitioner failed to establish its expert as a person of skill in the art, which would have rendered the expert’s testimony inadmissible under Kyocera Senco Indus. Tools Inc. v. Intl. Trade Commn., 22 F.4th 1369 (Fed. Cir. 2022). In rejecting the patent owner’s argument, the Board found the expert to be a person of at least ordinary skill in the art “for purposes of institution,” but invited the patent owner to explore the issue further during trial.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board recently rejected an inter partes review petition that relied on a conclusory and unsupported expert declaration. The expert’s written testimony, which repeated portions of the petition verbatim, did not provide the necessary evidence to support the conclusion that one of skill would have understood the prior art as either teaching a limitation or rendering obvious the claims at issue.

In an IPR institution decision issued shortly after the USPTO issued interim guidance on discretionary denials, the PTAB held that the petition presented “compelling evidence of unpatentability,” foreclosing a Fintiv discretionary denial. 

A recent board decision denying inter partes review serves as a reminder that an expert opining on obviousness must at least meet the definition of an ordinarily skilled artisan.

In the weeks preceding a recent Hatch-Waxman bench trial, a district court excluded portions of an expert’s opinion on obviousness that addressed internal documents and inventor testimony concerning the “inventors’ path” to arriving at the invention, finding that such portions of the opinion amounted to impermissible hindsight. 

In Kyocera Senco Industrial Tools Inc. v. International Trade Commission, the Federal Circuit held that an expert who did not possess the specific defined level of ordinary skill in the art could not testify about infringement, despite having advanced degrees and extensive experience in the general field of study. In so doing, the court confirmed that it is the defined level of skill in the art that determines whether an expert can provide relevant and reliable testimony from the perspective of a skilled artisan.

On August 15, 2016, Judge Orrick of the Northern District of California granted-in-part defendant Sophos’s motion to exclude the testimony of plaintiff Finjan’s damages expert. Sophos urged, among other things, that the expert’s apportionment methodology improperly inflated her royalty base. Specifically, Sophos argued that Finjan’s expert improperly inflated the royalty base by double or triple counting revenue attributable to the “threat engine” and “live protection” features of the accused software products. That is, Finjan’s expert apportioned the royalty base by 28.6 percent (or 2/7) as to both patents-in-suit, even though each patent covered those same two features. “In this way, [the expert] counts the revenue attributable to certain features multiple times in calculating her royalty base such that her total apportionment calculation uses a royalty base that is over 100 percent of the total value of several of the accused products.”