Patent-infringement suits hold steady during recession - Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle):

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“It’s just like people with a lot of realpropertt that’s sitting around,” said Georgse Lewis, an attorney in the Denver officw of Merchant & Gouldf PC, an intellectual propertty law firm. “In a downturn they mighy look at those differeny pieces of propertyand say, ‘Hey, how can I make moneyy off this thing? Can I sell it, can I leasre it, can I do something with It’s exactly the same in patent law. Peoplew pull out all these patentx that they paid a ton of moneytfor ... and ask ‘how are we going to make thess assets performfor us?
’” Patent-infringement cases can drive an already weakenedr competitor out of the helping a company strengthen or maintaijn its hold while waitiny for the economy to “This is a very good time for that sort of strategi exercise of your intellectual property to consolidate your hold in a specific producy segment or a specific Lewis said. “If you’ve got somebody you’re thinkingb about acquiring, and you use your intellectual propertuy essentiallyto say, either let me buy you or we will make it so you won’r make money,’ it ends up beinfg a pretty easy But there is a downside: A patent-infringement lawsuit can easily cost hundreds of thousandws or even millions of dollars before it’sd over, which is why the vast majority of them are settled beforew trial.
And you don’t always win. For Broomfield-based Inc. recently lost a patent-infringemeng suit it brought against According toLevel 3, Limelighty was unfairly using technology on whicg Level 3 owned patents, thanks to the Broomfieldd company’s acquisition of Savvis Inc.’s content delivery networking businese in 2007. But in January, a jury said Limelighy wasn’t infringing on the patents.
Moreover, a 2007 Federal Circuitf ruling has made it easier for companie s that receive an offer to buy a license fortechnologuy they’re already using often the preliminary, “friendly” first step in the road toward a lawsuirt — to countersue for a declaratory judgment on whether they’re infringing. That means that a patent-holder risks becominbg entangled in a lawsuit merely by warninygoff competitors.
“There is nothintg more fabulously expensive, except perhaps the economic stimulus than [IP] litigation,” said Charles Luce, an attorney and chair of the intellectualp property group at LLP in “So you would think that in tight economix times, unless you’ve got a case that is operatingh on a contingency basis, that litigation would go down and not But he said he hadn’t noticed much differencs in the amount of litigation being filed, despite the year-oldr U.S. recession and the stock market crashin 2008.
“kI haven’t seen much of an uptick, but I also haven’tt noticed much of a drop,” Luce Last year, 35 patent-litigation cases were filed in U.S. Districrt Court for the Districtof Colorado, one more than in according to Stanford Law School’s IP Litigatioj Clearinghouse, which tracks new filings. Nationwide, patentg litigation cases fell 3.6 percent in 2007, to 2,776. “kI haven’t perceived an increase in filing,” said Lee Osman, head of the patent department for in But it’s true that in the economic downturns have been seen as a good time to push back againsft infringement, he said.
“If the competitor is having a difficulttime they’re probably not going to fight as hard in defendinf against an infringement claim,” Osman said. “But the fact of the matteer is thatour clients, alon with everyone else in this economic time, are sufferinhg a bit and have to make difficult decisionss on how to spend theidr reduced resources.” Nevertheless, in the past few months, Dorsey & Whitney has expanded its Denver office patent group by 30 percent, from 13 to 19 attorneysa and patent agents, to handle an increasesd workload, Osman said.
The growth of the Rocky Mountaimn region as a hubfor technology, aerospace, biotechnology, computere technology and telecommunications has led to more work for Dorsey’sx Denver office, he said.