Re: MOU
posted on
Dec 17, 2008 07:45PM
At the time of trial the patents were considered valid, but since they were at that time being challenged, and since it was overwhelmingly decided by the Markman that the J's were infringing, the only factor to be considered had to be the validity challenge. The J's would argue that the patents would not withstand the scrutiny of a re-examination. What else did they have fall back on? The timeline for a re-exam being approximately two years, the court was apparently not willing to wait. So, apparently, the court must have been willing to proceed and determine the validity issue on it's own. Big disadvantage here for the TPL team. They did not want to proceed and have the validity issue determined by the court, and since the J's were not the only infringers of our patents (400 more waiting in the wings) both paries agreed to mediation. We were the party that initiated this suit, the court was willing to proceed, equals a lot of pressure on us. We caved and got very little in re-turn. Why would the Judge allow validation contingencies in a MOU in a case we were not willing to pursue? Why would the J's agree to validation contingencies in a MOU in a case we were not willing to pursue? If there were validation contingencies in the MOU and the case was still pending on those issues, and since the current litigation concerns the same patents, our venue for the T3 case would probably be Texas and not California.The company has said there is nothing more to come from the J's. It has to be a dead issue.
P.S. Writing a brief was Roger Cooks forte, negoiation, or anything resembling coherent speech was not, hence we lost a lot in negoiation. JMO