February 26, 2014 - Yesterday a federal judge ruled that Kolon Industries Inc. must pay over $18 million in attorneys' fees to DuPont Co. in a case involving trade secrets that Kolon obtained illegally from former DuPont employees.
The Obama Administration is in the process of launching initiatives aimed at helping inventors who need legal help filing patents and/or defendants who have been targeted by patent assertion entities (PAEs), the latest term for what is commonly called a patent troll. PAEs are defined as businesses that center their business model on patent lawsuits and demand letters.
February 22, 2014 - Apple and Samsung's top executives attended a meeting hosted by a mediator earlier this month, but were unable to come to an agreement in the two-year-old patent lawsuit.
February 13, 2014 - GE Lighting settled with CRS Electronics, ending a patent infringement lawsuit that began in December 2012.
GE alleged that CRS infringed two U.S. patents, 6,799,864 and 6,787,999, related to LED lamp heat sink designs and methods of replacing existing lamps with these designs. CRS agreed to take a license under the two patents.
February 10, 2014 - Canon filed 11 patent lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against 18 companies who manufacture, distribute and/or sell toner cartridges that Canon claims infringe nine of its patents.
February 3, 2014 - The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) filed a patent suit against Apple, claiming that Apple's newest A7 processor infringes U.S. Patent No. 5,781,752, entitled "Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer." WARF alleges that Apple's iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and iPad Mini with Retina Display each use Apple's newest A7 processor and thus infringe the '752 patent.