L'Oreal Looks For Friendlier Locales In Its Suits Against eBay

from the you-can-even-shop-for-jurisdictions-easily-online dept

US courts have generally recognized that eBay isn't liable for the actions of people who use its site to sell counterfeit goods, though a recent decision went the other way. This situation reflects the lack of uniformity around the world in this type of case: for instance, eBay was found liable in France, but was not in Belgium. In the Belgian case, eBay was sued by cosmetics maker L'Oreal, but the company hasn't let the ruling slow it down, as it's now filed a similar suit in the UK. It's also sued eBay in France, Germany and Spain -- which could lead one to believe that it's jurisdiction shopping, simply filing suits in many different countries and seeing what sticks, with the hopes that victory in one place will force eBay to play ball worldwide. The issue of eBay's lack of liability as a platform provider remains an important one, but the problem of international jurisdiction shopping remains a massive one for companies online.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Do Patent Lawyers Really Want To Put Limits On The Rocket Docket Of East Texas?

from the not-sure-I-believe-that.. dept

There's not much upon which I agree with the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA). So, consider me a little surprised (and somewhat suspicious) that the group has filed an amicus brief suggesting that the East Texas docket is handling too many patent cases and hasn't transferred cases that clearly should be transferred. This is a similar issue to a ruling we recently noted at the appeals court level pushing for easier transfer of cases to more convenient locations. While it's nice to see the AIPLA come out and basically admit that patent holders have been forum shopping and abusing the court system to get favorable rulings, the cynic in me says that they're doing this as a way to tell Congress that patent reform isn't needed (since forum shopping is one aspect of patent reform under consideration).

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Courts May Now Have More Leeway In Moving Patent Lawsuits Away From East Texas

from the slowly,-but-surely dept

Slowly, but surely, the courts are fixing many (though, not nearly all) of the most egregious problems with the patent system. The Supreme Court has been a big part of this with a series of decisions in the last few years that are pushing to re-establish at least some of the patent system's original purpose from what it has turned into. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which is the appeals court that handles patent suit appeals (and is often considered one of the reasons why the patent system has gone so astray) appears to finally be getting the message. Earlier this year, we noted that CAFC was finally going to re-evaluate the patentability of software and business models. And, now, it looks like CAFC is looking to alleviate all the jurisdiction shopping that happens in the lower courts, leading to so many patent lawsuits being filed in Marshall, Texas.

What's slightly ironic, of course, is that one of the main reasons CAFC was created in the first place was to put an end to jurisdiction shopping in the past. What used to happen, prior to CAFC, was that patent attorneys knew which districts and which appeals courts tended to favor patent holders, and would rush to file in those districts. In forming CAFC, the idea was that all appeals would go to a central court. What they didn't expect was that CAFC would become dominated by former patent attorneys who were always in favor of more patents -- and that the jurisdiction shopping would just shift down to the district court level.

However, last week, CAFC came out with a ruling that appears to say that district courts should pay more attention to making sure patent lawsuits are held in districts that are convenient. Right now, in order to file in East Texas, all you need to do is claim that the companies "do business" in the district and to have a local lawyer (of which there are plenty willing to help). So you get absolutely ridiculous situations where two California companies right down the street from one another, find themselves in court in Texas for no reason other than the fact that the Texas district court is known to be both quick and likely to favor patent holders. This latest ruling certainly won't fix things entirely, but it does suggest that CAFC is at least sympathetic to the problem of patent holders picking a favorable jurisdiction, often at odds with the most reasonable location -- and suggesting that perhaps that doesn't make sense any more.

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