January 24, 2014 - The U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Medtronic, Inc. v. Mirowski Family Ventures, reversing a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which hears appeals in patent lawsuits.
January 22, 2014 - A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found that with the push notification services in Android, Google infringes a SimpleAir patent. The Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) and Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) services, which send instant notifications to applications such as Twitter, Gmail and Facebook, were found to infringe SimpleAir's U.S. Patent No.
It recently came to light that Texas-based MPHJ Technology Investments has sent an astounding 16,465 letters to small businesses, requesting that they pay a license fee of $1,000 per worker or face a patent infringement lawsuit. And we know this, in part, because MPHJ has now filed suit against the Federal Trade Commission.
January 22, 2014 - A group of cable companies, including Charter Communications and several smaller companies, banded together to sue the Rockstar Consortium in U.S. District Court in Delaware for violating agreements to charge only Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) royalty rates for the Nortel patents. Rockstar had agreed at the time of its massive patent purchase in 2011 to honor the FRAND agreements made by Nortel regarding its patents.
January 15, 2014 - Medtronic Inc. was ordered to pay over $392 million to Edwards Lifesciences Corp. when it lost a patent infringement lawsuit concerning patents on a new heart valve device. Medtronic already paid Edwards $84 million in initial damages last year related to a patent case that is still pending.