The Supreme Court decided two patent cases and one copyright case this month. If the three cases have a unifying theme, it is that the Supreme Court gave more deference to fact-finding tribunals, whether that is the Patent Office or district courts. We discuss each of the three rulings below.
Halo Electronics v. Pulse Electronics
TL;DR: The Supreme Court gives district courts more discretion to impose enhanced damages in patent cases.
The Patent Act allows courts, in certain cases, to impose treble damages on those found to infringe a patent. The Federal Circuit had limited enhanced damages to cases where the defendant had infringed willfully and had no objectively sound defense. While this might have been good policy, it didn’t find much support in the statutory language. The Supreme Court has made a habit of reversing the Federal Circuit for applying strict, multi-factor rules that are not supported by the relevant statutes (examples here, here, and here). So it was no great surprise when the court unanimously overruled the Federal Circuit in this case.
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