Latest Case: Koninklijke Philips N.V. v. Google, LLC (Intellectual Property)

Should Animals Be Allowed to Sue?

SHERRY F. COLB

Cornell law professor Sherry F. Colb comments on case in which Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) brought a civil damages suit on behalf of an abused horse, now named Justice, against the horse’s former owner. Colb dismantles three arguments critics raise in opposition to recognizing abused animals as plaintiffs in lawsuits such as this one.

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Koninklijke Philips N.V. v. Google, LLC

Docket: 19-1177

Opinion Date: January 30, 2020

Judge: Sharon Prost

Areas of Law: Intellectual Property, Patents

Koninklijke's patent identifies prior art technologies for delivering digital content for playback on a client device: downloading and streaming. It states that downloading suffers from delay because the user cannot playback the digital content until after the entire file finishes downloading; streaming generally requires “two-way intelligence” and a “high level of integration between client and server software,” which “mostly excludes third parties from developing custom server software.” On Google’s petition, the Patent Board instituted inter partes review (IPR) and construed the claim term “a given segment of [a/the] media presentation” to mean “a media presentation with multiple segments.” The Board concluded that Google had not demonstrated that any of the claims were anticipated but that Google had demonstrated that claims 1–11 would have been obvious. The Federal Circuit affirmed, first holding that the Board erred by instituting IPR of claims 1–11 based on obviousness over two prior references because Google did not advance such a combination of references in its petition. The Board did not violate 35 U.S.C. 311(b) or the IPR statute in determining that the claims would have been obvious over a prior reference in light of the general knowledge of a skilled artisan. The Board’s factual findings underlying its obviousness determination are supported by substantial evidence.