Patent bully?
Qualcomm, Inc., holds lots of patents relating to digital processor technology, an essential ingredient in wireless telephones. Qualcomm in fact annually earns more than $2 billion in profit from royalty payments on its 1,900-plus patents.
A recent article highlights complaints about Qualcomm’s litigiousness. "Even their best customers hate their guts", someone said.
Sowing wind may cause whirlwind.
Blawgletter admits to a fine obsession with the notion of risk, largely because every business case that goes to trial involves it. That includes "litigation risk" — the irreducible chance that something may go horribly wrong. Plaintiffs lawyers count on litigation risk when demanding supersize settlements (and accepting littler ones)
Stock painting of flying spaghetti monster. Photo of
arbitragation monster currently unavailable.
Texas Lawyer comes out next Monday with an article on the 11-5 en banc decision in Positive Software Systems, Inc. v. New Century Mortgage Co., No. 04-11432 (5th Cir. Jan. 18, 2007). (See previous post with link to opinions here.) Too
The Roberts Court takes a break.
For those of you who’ve started missing a near-daily dose of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, take heart. According to its handy-dandy online calendar, the Court went on hiatus after a "non-argument session" on January 22, 2007. Their Honors will return on February 16 for a "conference day".
Labor union keeps arbitration
award despite arbitrator’s
"serious error".
So long as an arbitrator "plainly was ‘arguably construing’ the contract", the full Sixth Circuit held today, courts must uphold his award even if he "just as plainly made a ‘serious error’ in construing the contract". Michigan Family Resources, Inc. v. Service Employees Int’l Union Local
"The Death of Socrates" by Jacques-Louis
David (1787).
The mind-bending experience of learning to think like a lawyer results, in law school, largely from having to answer professors’ tricky questions — a method we call Socratic after the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (circa 470-399 B.C.). Like the Athenian jurors who sentenced him to death for
NERA Economic Consulting’s annual study, Recent Trends in Shareholder Class Action Litigation: Filings Plummet, Settlements Soar (Jan. 2007) (available here), includes a chart showing the rates of dismissal for securities class actions in the 11 U.S. circuit courts of appeals during 2006. To Blawgletter’s surprise, the Tenth Circuit (covering Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma
Two federal appellate decisions came out today on antitrust issues, both in the realm of monopolization law:
In Hydril Co. LP v. Grant Pride LP, No. 2006-1188 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 25, 2007) (opinion here), a 2-1 panel reinstated Hydril’s claim that Grant Pride monopolized the markets for drill pipe and drill pipe connections
Parsley as garnish in the non-legal sense.
A decision today out of the Ninth Circuit — on garnishment of a foreign sovereign’s U.S. assets — reminded Blawgletter of a comment from law school days, On Third World Debt, 25 Harv. Int’l L.J. 83 (1984). The piece discusses the ballooning of third world countries’ borrowings
Syringe may infringe.
The Federal Circuit today rejected a district court’s construction of several terms in a patent relating to hypodermic safety syringes and thus reversed a summary judgment of noninfringement. MBO Laboratories, Inc. v. Becton, Dickinson & Co., No. 2006-1062 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 24, 2007) (opinion here).
BBar
