On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a petition seeking the Supreme Court to consider an ongoing legal case about access to data stored overseas.  But the courts are powerless to craft a balanced policy for law enforcement access to data stored abroad.  Only Congress can do it.

In their landmark decision on May 22nd, the Supreme Court decided 8-0 in favor of TC Heartland over Kraft Foods Group, changing the dynamics of patent litigation across the country. In the case itself, Kraft sued TC Heartland, claiming that TC Heartland had infringed on Kraft’s patent for the low-calorie water sweetener, MiO.  The Court held that the defendant could only be sued in the state in which it was incorporated.  Earlier this week, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property held a hearing on the impact of the TC Heartland decision, and heard testimony that although the TC Heartland decision is helpful, it is not a panacea for litigation abuse.

Earlier this week, SIIA filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on patent venue, urging it to reverse the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of the existing patent venue statute, 28 U.S.C. 1400(b).  Although the argument is a technical one, the resolution of this case has important implications for the technology industry.  The misinterpretation of that statute has concentrated patent litigation in a single district that has encouraged the growth of the patent assertion business model.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed a decision of the Federal Circuit in the long-running iPhone litigation between Apple and Samsung and we, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), welcomed it.  The Federal Circuit had held that when a design patent is infringed, the plaintiff is entitled to the total profits from the infringing product—even where the infringing product has many components.  The lower court had permitted Apple to recover all of the profits from the sale of infringing Samsung Galaxy phones, despite the fact that the allegedly infringed elements were minor ornamental components of the overall product. 

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the long-running Samsung v. Apple design patent litigation and took special note of the technology industry’s concerns.  The Court was reviewing a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit holding that someone found to infringe a design patent could be liable for all of the profits made from the infringing product, even if the reason that consumers bought the product was in substantial part because of its functionality.   (We wrote previously about that here. The reason for the lower court’s holding stemmed from the language of 35 U.S.C. 279, which says, in relevant part (emphasis added):

SIIA Testifies at Joint Congressional Subcommittee Hearing on Student Privacy