Potter Minton, A Professional Corporation, together with its co-counsel Baker Botts, won a complete patent defense victory in court before Judge Gilstrap on September 24, 2015 in Marshall, Texas for their clients Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. in a patent litigation brought by plaintiff ContentGuard Holdings, Inc. (ContentGuard Holdings, Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc. et al., filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Case No. 2:11-cv- 01112).
The jury deliberated for less than three hours before returning a verdict of no infringement for all asserted patents, which was a full defense victory for Samsung and its co-defendant, Google. The plaintiff had sought $309 million in damages from Samsung and $10 million from Google.
This case and its companion cases involve some of the biggest names in the technology industry, including Amazon.com, Apple, Huawei, HTC, Motorola and Google. ContentGuard had accused Samsung of infringing three different patents related to Digital Rights Management (“DRM”) technology, and had similarly accused many of the major mobile device makers. The asserted patents originated with work done at Xerox PARC.
Neil Sirota, one of the Baker Botts Intellectual Property partners, who worked on this case with lead counsel, Michael Barta, said this about the case: “We are proud to have obtained this result for Samsung. We believe this case demonstrates a number of the firm’s capabilities, including our technical strengths, our ability to collaborate well with co-defendants, and our ability to represent valued clients like Samsung in critical, high-stakes litigation that impacts their most important businesses.”
The Potter Minton patent defense team representing counsel to Samsung were: Mike Jones; John Bufe; Allen Gardner; Patrick Clutter; Amanda Tekell; Jo Vallery; and Nicole Winningham.
