It's interesting to look at the first two months of 2015 against the backdrop of the previous year. Judge Illston's orders, for example, suggest that one should not expect much to change in ND Cal judges' willingness to invalidate patents under Alice (specifically, in her case, a patent for storing "link relationships" between "document objects" in a network) and to stay cases pending IPR (especially when a large number of patents and products are involved). Magistrate Judge Grewal also followed an approach that we've seen before, ruling that both sides in a discovery dispute should make foreign-based party witnesses available for deposition in the Northern District. Typo Products found itself haunted by the past when Judge Orrick awarded $1 million in sanctions to Blackberry for Typo's violation of a preliminary injunction. Meanwhile, Rep. Goodlatte, R-VA, hoped to shake off past failures by reintroducing a version of the Innovation Act bill that died in the Senate last May.
February 2015 was also trial month for the patent litigation between Open Text and Box. In the preceding weeks, Judge Donato issued several noteworthy decisions, including a Rule 12(c) judgment of invalidity of claims from 5 patents under Alice and a Daubert order excluding the damages opinions of plaintiff Open Text's expert. Notwithstanding Open Text's lack of expert testimony on a reasonable royalty, the jury awarded Open Text $4.9 million in a lump sum (Law360, subscription required).
Over at Patently-O, guest author Andres Sawicki discusses the role of intellectual property in the uniquely Silicon Valley practice of "acqui-hires." And if all that isn't enough recap for you, why not revisit our most popular blog posts from 2014?
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