Here is a report on recent news and commentary related to the Federal Circuit and its cases. Today’s report covers an article on a recent petition for rehearing by Capital One Financial, a discussion of the Federal Circuit’s second decision in the past month involving Campbell Soup and Gamon Plus, and a comment on when judicial economy can lead to error.
Bryan Koenig reported for Law 360 on Capital One’s petition for rehearing in Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Capital One Financial Corp., noting that Capital One Financial argued “the appeals court “created ‘trail-blazing exceptions’ to federal rules restricting duplicative cases” and “the Federal Circuit wrongly applied the principle of collateral estoppel to the claims.” The question presented in the petition is: “Whether the Court can sidestep the district court’s erroneous holding that the Noerr-Pennington doctrine immunizes patent acquisitions from antitrust scrutiny by creating novel exceptions to settled Fourth Circuit collateral-estoppel law that the Fourth Circuit has never adopted.”
Patently-O’s Dennis Crouch highlighted the Federal Circuit’s decision in Campbell Soup Co. v. Gamon Plus, Inc., the second Federal Circuit decision involving these two parties in the past month. This decision focuses on the utility patent related to the design patent of the first case, and here, “the Federal Circuit sided with the patentee.”
At Patent Docs, Kevin Noonan commented on the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in NeuroGrafix v. Brainlab, Inc., citing it as an example of when “[o]ne person’s attempt at judicial economy can be another person’s impermissible shortcut.” In this case, the Federal Circuit overturned a multidistrict litigation court’s grant of summary judgment of non-infringement. “NeuroGrafix had argued that Brainlab’s software could be practiced in an infringing manner, asserting Brainlab’s advertisements, and the MDL Court eventually agreed that Brainlab’s software could be used in an infringing and non-infringing manner.” As explained by Noonan, that “‘was sufficient for NeuroGrafix to defeat summary judgment,’ according to the Federal Circuit’s opinion, because it raised a genuine issue of material fact and ‘[e]vidence of actual infringing uses’ were not necessary.” “As for the MDL court (and the impermissibility of judicial economy as the basis for its decision),” Noonan cited the Federal Circuit’s statement that the MDL court “was not free to look down the road and consider what the non-movant might need to establish to survive a differently structured, well-supported motion.”