IP Newsflash

On January 3, 2019, following a jury’s award of $145 million in damages to Wi-LAN, the Southern District of California granted Apple’s motion for a conditional order of remittitur to a $10 million damages award. In granting remittitur, the court reasoned that Wi-LAN’s expert’s apportionment methodology rendered Wi-LAN’s damages opinion unreliable.

In a November 21, 2016, order, the Honorable Janis L. Sammartino of the Southern District of California dismissed The Scripps Research Institute’s (TSRI) patent infringement claims without prejudice because TSRI failed to satisfy the recently heightened pleading standard for direct infringement. In setting out the relevant standard, the court noted that “Form 18”—a basic patent infringement form complaint that was previously appended to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, but eliminated on December 1, 2015—no longer applied. Instead, as the court had previously held, the pleading standard set out in the Supreme Court’s Twombly and Iqbal decisions now governed claims for patent infringement. The court held that, under Twombly, a complaint for patent infringement “must plausibly allege that a defendant directly infringes each limitation in at least one asserted claim.” The court did not elaborate on how much specificity is required to demonstrate that each limitation of an asserted claim is “plausibly met” by the accused products, but it did clarify that its holding “does not require a patentee to plead with the specificity required in its infringement contentions.” Notably, the court also held that a plaintiff need only plausibly allege infringement of a single claim for the complaint to survive, and it is not required to identify all asserted claims and all infringing products in its initial pleading. However, “all of a patentee’s asserted claims for infringement must eventually appear in its complaint, amended or otherwise.”

A district court judge denied a plaintiff’s motion to preliminarily enjoin a defendant from selling saliva collection kits for DNA testing.