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Quality of investigation irrelevant to whether claims objectively baseless

By McKee, Voorhees & Sease, P.L.C.

In a Wednesday decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court decision that a patent holder's communications with a competitor's customers that the competitor's products were infringing were not objectively baseless, and therefore could not support state law tort claims of unfair competition, intentional interference with contractual relations, interference with prospective economic advantage, and trade libel.  The court noted that the patent holder had successfully defeated a motion for summary judgment of non-infringement before the ITC and an ALJ had found infringement of one of the patentee's patents.  Thus, it could not logically follow that the patentee's pre-litigation communications alleging patent infringement were objectively baseless.

The court also reaffirmed that in order for such communications to support state tort claims such as those asserted in this case, the assertions of infringement must be both objectively and subjectively baseless.  Here, the plaintiff attacked that patentee's opinion of counsel that infringement was occurring as incompetent, but the court noted that this was only relevant to whether the claims were subjectively baseless.  Because the claims were not such that "no reasonable litigant could reasonably expect success on the merits," the plaintiff could not show objective baselessness, and the court therefore did not even consider whether the claims were subjectively baseless.  All in all, the case confirms that it is extremely difficult for plaintiffs to prevail on these types of claims.

More concerning Dominant Semiconductors Sdn. Bhd. v. OSRAM GmbH after the jump,

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Full post as published by FileWrapper on April 25, 2008 (boomark / email).