A recent Law 360 story by Kelly Leinhard, “Reverse Dish, Sirius XM Fee Award in IP Row, Fed. Circ. Urged” reports that patent-holding company Dragon Intellectual Property LLC urged a federal appeals court to overturn a ruling that found a decade-long infringement fight exceptional, allowing counsel for Dish Network and Sirius XM to collect more than $3 million in attorney fees. Dragon alleged that the Delaware district court abused its discretion when finding the case exceptional, which led to higher attorney fees, by misreading claim language and not fully considering Dragon's expert testimony.
"When it accepted the unreviewed determination as resolving the issues presented by the exceptional case motions, the district court disregarded Dragon's presentation, ignored the requirements of Supreme Court authority, and abused its discretion," Dragon said. "The exceptional case finding should be reversed."
The district court had found that the case was exceptional and that the defense team was entitled to higher fees because the infringement allegations had no merit when faced with "one of the clearest cases of prosecution history disclaimer the court had ever seen." Disclaimers are made by applicants during patent application reviews and can limit the scope of protection provided by a patent.
Even without the disclaimer, Dragon continued to pursue the "meritless" case for nearly a decade. However, even though Dish's counsel, Baker Botts, and Sirius' counsel, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, netted a combined $3.3 million, the attorneys still were not awarded their full fee request and petitioned the court in August for the rest of the money. Dragon said in a response brief that the case should never have been found to be exceptional because it was based on a flawed disclaimer ruling resulting from the district court's misreading of the claim language.
According to Dragon, the district court erred by misreading the claim language as a verb — "to begin a recording" — instead of a noun — "a recording." By conflating the noun form of the claim language with the verb form, the court caused a series of events leading to a claim construction order finding that Sirius and Dish had included clear disclaimers of continuous recording devices in their products.
The patent-holding company hinted that Sirius and Dish pushed the court toward this thinking, saying the two companies wanted to pass off the idea of beginning a recording by initiating the storage of specific broadcast program information, which Dragon said is agnostic as to whether the overall recording process was underway. "In this exchange, the district court equated the noun form of the claim language with a verb form requiring that the entire recording process, rather than the storage of specific broadcast program information of the invention, begin upon actuation of the key," Dragon said.
The court's disclaimer ruling based on this conflation resulted in "stipulated judgments of noninfringement," Dragon said, because the court found that Dish and Sirius had clearly included a disclaimer that their product contained continuous recording devices. The disclaimer finding has remained the foundation for "many years of subsequent litigation" without review, despite the absence of evidence proving that Dish and Sirius included a clear disclaimer on their products, Dragon said.
According to Dragon, the U.S. Supreme Court found in 1990's Lewis v. Continental Bank Corp. that an interest in attorney fees is insufficient to claim an extraordinary case, and in Dragon's case, no other justiciable case or controversy has come forward since the cases became moot. Dragon filed the suits against the companies nearly 10 years ago in December 2013, claiming both Dish and Sirius XM were infringing a patent on a keyboard equipped with audiovisual recording and playback technology.