Opinions

This morning, the Federal Circuit released a nonprecedential opinion in a patent case addressing the court’s appellate jurisdiction. The court also released a related order transferring the appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Here is the introduction to the opinion and text from the order.

Teradata Corporation v. SAP SE (Nonprecedential)

Teradata Corp., Teradata Operations, Inc., and Teradata US, Inc. (collectively, Teradata) brought the present action against SAP America, Inc., SAP Labs LLC, and SAP SE (collectively, SAP) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.  Teradata’s allegations, as it ultimately narrowed them, were that SAP (1) tied the offering of two of its products together in violation of antitrust laws, see 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 14, and (2) misappropriated Teradata’s technical trade secrets relating to its “batched merge” method and certain business trade secrets, actionable under 18 U.S.C. § 1836 et seq. and California Civil Code § 3426 et seq.  SAP was permitted to file counterclaims asserting, as ultimately narrowed by SAP, that Teradata infringed SAP’s U.S. Patent Nos. 9,626,421, 8,214,321, and 7,617,179.  Eventually, as relevant here, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of SAP on Teradata’s tying claim and technical-trade-secret claim and entered final judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b) on those claims (while staying proceedings on Teradata’s business-trade-secret claim and SAP’s patent counterclaims, having partially addressed the latter).  Teradata timely appealed.

We decide only the issue of this court’s jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(1), which, as the parties agree, depends on whether SAP’s patent-infringement counterclaims arise out of the same transaction or occurrence as Teradata’s relevant technical-trade-secret claims so that they are compulsory counterclaims.  We answer that question in the negative.  Holding that we lack jurisdiction, we transfer this appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where appellate jurisdiction lies.

Teradata Corporation v. SAP SE (Nonprecedential Order)

Upon consideration of the court’s opinion that the above-captioned appeal be transferred to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,  

IT IS ORDERED THAT: 

The above-captioned appeal is transferred to the Ninth Circuit pursuant to 28 U.S.C.§1631.