This is a guest post by Janice M. Mueller of Chisum Patent Academy.
Today the Supreme Court rewrote the law of enhanced damages for willful patent infringement by issuing a unanimous decision in No. 14-1513, Halo Elecs., Inc. v. Pulse Elecs., Inc., 2016 WL 3221515 (U.S. June 13, 2016), and the companion case, No. 14-1520, Stryker Corp. v. Zimmer, Inc., 2016 WL 3221515 (June 13, 2016). Swept away as “unduly rigid,” “inelastic,” impermissibly encumbering” district courts’ discretion, an “artificial construct,” and simply inconsistent with the text of 35 U.S.C. 284, the Federal Circuit’s elaborate framework for determining whether infringement damages should be enhanced (and reviewing such determinations on appeal), as set forth in In re Seagate Tech. LLC, 479 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2007) (en banc) and Bard Peripheral Vascular, Inc. v. W.L. Gor & Assoc., Inc., 682 F.3d 1003 (Fed. Cir. 2012), is no longer good law.
You can read the entire post here.
In Gilead Sciences, Inc. v. Merck & Co., Inc., Case No. 13-cv-04057-BLE (N.D. Cal., June 6, 2016), Judge Beth Freeman, sitting in equity, found that the record compelled a finding that Merck and its employee “D” had obtained asserted patents 7,105,499 and 8,481,712 after using inequitable conduct. Earlier, the jury had found the patents valid and awarded Merck $200 million in damages for infringement of this costly drug, that contains the active ingredient sofosbuvir or solvaldi.
The PTO has released a new set of life sciences’ examples to teach Examiners how and when to reject claims and, hopefully, teach the patent bar how to write allowable claims. (A copy if found at the end of this post.)
