Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report highlights:
- an article noting how a “[f]ederal judge sitting atop mound of patent litigation loses perch with equitable-distribution order”;
- another article addressing how “Netflix [won] attorneys’ fees for California litigation at Federal Circuit”;
- a third article discussing how an engineer filed an amicus brief critiquing a Federal Circuit decision that would allegedly “let federal agencies ‘cut corners’ and render public accountability ‘superfluous.'”
Debra Cassens Weiss authored an article for ABAJournal noting how Judge Alan Albright, “[a] federal judge in Waco, Texas, who hears nearly 25% of the nation’s patent cases, will see his intellectual-property docket shrink as a result of a new order on case distribution.” Weiss noted how “[n]ew patent cases filed in Waco will now be distributed randomly to 12 other federal judges in the Western District of Texas, according to a July 25 order by Chief U.S. District Judge Orlando L. Garcia.” As explained by Weiss, Albright “tended to deny defendants’ motions to transfer cases to courts that they thought were more convenient, leading to transfer orders by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.”
Samantha Handler published an article with Bloomberg Law addressing how, in Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Netflix, Inc., “Netflix Inc. will get $409,000 in attorneys’ fees as the winning party in a patent infringement suit that the patent owner voluntarily dismissed.” As the article notes, “[p]atent owner Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC’s behavior of shopping between the US District Court for the District of Delaware and the Central District of California was a ‘misuse of the ability to refile,’ Judge Raymond T. Chen wrote for the . . . Federal Circuit.”
Andrew Karpan wrote an article for Law360 discussing how, in Arthrex, Inc. v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., “[a]n engineer and longtime critic of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has weighed in on a Federal Circuit ruling that allowed a former patent commissioner to conduct director reviews while he was at the helm of the [PTAB].” Karpan noted how “Ron Katznelson, an engineer behind numerous telecom patents who runs a California company called Bi-Level Technologies” filed an amicus brief in support of Anthrax’s petition for rehearing en banc. According to Karpan, Katznelson “said the circuit’s ruling could have a long-ranging effect on how agencies like the patent office navigate outside the constraints of the Federal Vacancy Reform Act of 1998.”