US Supreme Court declines to hear three patent cases

The US Supreme Court has rejected three patent cases, upholding the 109-year old Kessler doctrine and the rule on word limits in briefs.

Writs were denied in SpeedTrack v Office Depot, Morgan v Global Traffic Technologies and Arunachalam v JPMorgan Chase yesterday, January 11.

Licensing company SpeedTrack had claimed that Office Depot, as well as a number of other parties, had infringed its patent covering a computer filing system in their usage of the IAP software owned by Oracle.

Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the claim, stating that an earlier ruling that cleared WalMart of infringement for its use of the software saved Office Depot from an infringement claim under the Kessler doctrine.

The Kessler doctrine is a 109-year precedent that “bars a patent infringement action against a customer of a seller who has previously prevailed against the patentee”.

SpeedTrack, however, had argued that only a manufacturer, not a customer, can call on the Kessler doctrine and that it was improperly applied in the latest dispute.

But the federal circuit was not convinced.

“Allowing customers to assert a Kessler defence is consistent with the court’s goal of protecting the manufacturer’s right to sell an exonerated product free from interference or restraint,” the federal circuit said in the June ruling.

In Arunachalam, the case concerned the word limits on an appeal brief. Inventor Lakshmi Arunachalam had sought an en banc hearing of her dispute with JPMorgan Chase at the federal circuit. Under the court’s rules, briefs cannot exceed 14,000 words.

However, the inventor used abbreviations which the court said are “ poorly explained” making it “nearly incomprehensible” to read and ultimately surpassing the word limit.

The federal circuit ruled that the brief was in breach of its rules and dismissed the appeal. Arunachalam’s writ filed at the Supreme Court seeking a reversal of the decision was also rejected.

The dispute between inventor Rodney Morgan and Global Traffic Technologies concerned a ruling that Morgan had infringed a patent covering traffic signal programming for emergency vehicles. Morgan had sought a reversal of an earlier decision that he had infringed the patent.