Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
The annual Eastern District of Texas 2015 Bench Bar Conference started Wednesday at the Plano Marriott Legacy Town Center in Plano and The Texas Lawbook is there and providing complete coverage.
Patent holders flooded East Texas federal courts with an unprecedented number of new infringement lawsuits during the first six months of 2015. There were more lawsuits alleging patent violations filed in the EDT during the second quarter of the year than in all the other federal courts across the country combined. This article looks at the numbers and the reasons behind the record filings.
A Marble Falls maker of machine parts for the oil patch lost a closely watched trademark dispute against a rival firm when a federal judge Austin refused to invalidate the defendant’s trademark protections even thought the company’s patent on the product expired years earlier. Legal experts say Judge Spark’s ruling is one of the clearest and most straightforward court decision to state that judges must consider the validity of trademarks and patents separately, even when they involve the same product.
Commil USA v. Cisco Systems is definitely not the run-of-the-mill dry, unemotional patent infringement case. But any litigation that is known as the “Bodacious Bar-B-Q case” must be fascinating. The U.S. Supreme Court officially memorialized the case in the annals of legal history last week. Now the induced infringement case is headed back to East Texas for a third jury trial. More than $100 million will be at stake. This article examines the history of the case and the Supreme Court's decision.
The number of new patent case filings is on pace to rise in the first quarter of 2015 in the Eastern District of Texas. But an increasingly popular avenue for dealing with patent disputes is siphoning legal work away from the busiest forum in the country for settling squabbles over the ownership of inventions. Welcome to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
Houston trial lawyer Demetrios Anaipakos convinced the jury that his client, Rembrandt Wireless, is entitled to royalties on future sales of Samsung devices that use a wireless Bluetooth technology.
Businesses and individuals filed 26 percent more patent infringement lawsuits in East Texas during the first six months of 2014 than they did in 2013, which was also a record year. The federal courts in the Eastern District have seen a 1,400 percent increase in new patent filings over the past decade, even as such cases have remained steady in the rest of the state. But a separate study shows that the district is in danger of losing its reputation as pro-plaintiff due to an increase in defense verdicts. This is a comprehensive update on patent litigation in the Eastern District of Texas.
Starting this fall, law students at SMU and other Texas schools will provide free legal services to start-up companies and individual inventors in obtaining patents and trademarks.
A unanimous Supreme Court ruling Thursday will help courts apply existing patent laws to software inventions, experts say.
The Richardson video game maker id Software and its parent, ZeniMax Media, have laid out a detailed list of grievances in a trade secret dispute with Oculus VR, outside experts say.
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