Northern District Continues as a Top Five Patent District

Patent Appeal Tracer has a great post listing the patent filings for June 2008 by district.  Tracer used Pacer and "math" to come up with its list, which shows that the Northern District is fourth in patent filings for the month with 19 of 255 filings (about 85 of the total).  Those 19 filings give the Northern District 87 patent cases in the first half of 2008, well on the way to another busy year.  The top three were not surprising:

  1. Eastern District of Texas -- 32 filings
  2. District of Delaware -- 24 filings
  3. Central District of California -- 20 filings

Patent Appeal Tracer also mentions EZ4Media's two Northern District cases against thirteen defendants as cases to watch.  The defendants in those cases are alleged to infringe patents to wireless streaming of digital media.

[UPDATE:] More on the year's trademark and copyright filings is coming next week, prompted by Mike Graham's Seattle Trademark Lawyer post about this year's Western District of Washington trademark litigation statistics -- click here to read it.  Thanks for the mention Mike.

Trading Technologies v. eSpeed: The Appeals Begin

Trading Techs. Int’l, Inc. v. eSpeed, Inc., No. 2008-1392 & 1393 (Fed. Cir.).*

As Judge Moran predicted, the parties have appealed this case to the Federal Circuit.* The parties’ appeals were consolidated, leaving a single appeal with a substantial number of issues. The great, new Patent Appeal Tracer* reported that plaintiff Trading Technologies (“TT”) is appealing at least the following decisions (click here to read Tracer’s post on the cross-appeals):

Claim constructions, specifically constructions of "static price axis" and "order entry region"  (click here and here and here for the Blog’s posts regarding claim construction opinions);

  • Summary judgment of noninfringement of most of defendant eSpeed’s software packages, including the following titles: Dual Dynamic, eSpeedometer, and modified eSpeedometer programs (click here for the Blog’s post regarding this opinion);
  • Partial summary judgment for TT regarding prior use (click here for the Blog’s post regarding this opinion); and
  • Judgment as a matter of law overturning the jury’s willfulness finding (click here for the Blog’s post regarding this opinion).

And eSpeed is appealing, at least, the following decisions:

  • The permanent injunction regarding certain of eSpeed’s software packages (click here for the Blog’s post regarding the Court’s permanent injunction).

* Thanks to Patent Tracer for linking to the Blog’s TT v. eSpeed coverage. Click here to read much more about this case in the Blog’s archives.

New Legal Resources

In addition to the new regional IP blogs, here are several new legal resources:

  • Startup guru Guy Kawasaki has started the Alltop project which categorizes blogs by subject matter and aggregates blog content  for each subject on a single page.  The law Alltop site is excellent, although I would suggest adding the Chicago IP Litigation Blog.  It is like having someone else set up and update feed readers for you.  This is how Alltop describes itself:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

  • The Patent Appeal Tracer follows patent cases from filing of a Federal Circuit appeal, after many of the regional IP blogs stop following them, until an opinion issues, when Patently-O and others take over.  It is an interesting idea and a well written blog.  As an example of what they do, check out this recent post on the Federal Circuit appeal of Northern District case Ball Aerosol and Specialty Container, Inc. v. Limited Brands, Inc., No. 05 C 3684 (N.D. Ill.) (Der-Yeghiayan, J.) -- click here or here for coverage of the case in the Blog's archives.

[UPDATE]:  The Chicago IP Litigation Blog has been added to Alltop's law page.  Thanks Guy.  Now, if I could just get Kawasakied.