Fraud and Enforceability: Potential Implications for Federal Circuit Litigation

Should fraudulent litigation tactics and testimony affect the validity of underlying patents? What results are possible if the enforceability of a patent turns on the conduct of the applying party not only before the Patent and Trademark Office, but also before circuit courts? The author of the following article considers these questions in light of the recent Aptix Corp. case

Fraud and Enforceability: Potential Implications for Federal Circuit Litigation

Should fraudulent litigation tactics and testimony affect the validity of underlying patents? What results are possible if the enforceability of a patent turns on the conduct of the applying party not only before the Patent and Trademark Office, but also before circuit courts? The author of the following article considers these questions in light of the recent Aptix Corp. case

Patent Amendments and Prosecution History Estoppel Under Festo

On November 29, 2000, the Federal Circuit retroactively reduced the value of nearly 1.2 million unexpired United States patents by announcing a new rule for the somewhat obscure doctrine of prosecution history estoppel. Designed to foster clarity in patent applications, this new pronouncement in Festo Corp v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co. allows for easy copying of some patented inventions and reduces patent owner\u27s ability to prove infringement. This article outlines the change in the law and discusses the positive and negative consequences of the decision

Who’s Afraid of amazon.com v. barnesandnoble.com?

On October 2, 2000, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard the appeal in the case of Amazon.com, Inc. v. Barnesandnoble.com, Inc. This appeal revolves around the alleged infringement by Barnesandnoble.com of a one-click web-shopping system patented by Amazon.com. The one-click system is among a series of recent controversial business method patents. According to some, business methods are legitimate inventions that deserve the protection of the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). According to others, business methods are unworthy of patent protection and may inhibit innovation in e-commerce. The outcome of this case has been widely anticipated by both sides of the business method patent debate as a signal that these patents will or will not be upheld by courts

Structural stability of meandering-hyperbolic group actions

In his 1985 paper Sullivan sketched a proof of his structural stability theorem for group actions satisfying certain expansion-hyperbolicity axioms. In this paper we relax Sullivan's axioms and introduce a notion of meandering hyperbolicity for group actions on general metric spaces. This generalization is substantial enough to encompass actions of certain non-hyperbolic groups, such as actions of uniform lattices in semisimple Lie groups on flag manifolds. At the same time, our notion is sufficiently robust and we prove that meandering-hyperbolic actions are still structurally stable. We also prove some basic results on meandering-hyperbolic actions and give other examples of such actions.Comment: 58 pages, 5 figures; [v2] Corollary 3.19 is wrong and thus removed; [v3] Introduced a new notion of meandering hyperbolicity, generalized the main structural stability theorem even further, and added a new Section 5 on uniform lattices and their structural stabilit