Imagine That IP Law Blog

In its recent opinion in Free Stream Media Corp. v. Alphonso Inc. on May 11, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit confirmed that abstract idea claims directed to “targeted advertising” are patent ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l in 2014, which provides the current authority for determining whether a proposed invention is patent eligible under § 101, the Supreme Court has not provided additional guidance in the area of subject-matter eligibility, and courts have been unable ... Read More ›

Generally, many U.S. jurisdictions protect confidential communications between attorneys and their clients—attorneys and their clients cannot be forced to testify to these confidential communications and only the client can waive this privilege, unless the privilege is broken by some other event. Attorney-client privilege is broken when the confidential communication is shared with a third party, unless the third party is indispensable to the lawyer giving legal advice or facilitates in the lawyer giving legal advice (e.g., a client’s accountant present when the ... Read More ›

What if someone told you not all clauses in a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) are created equally? This was one of several lessons that could be drawn from SiOnyx LLC v. Hamamatsu Photonics K.K., 981 F.3d 1339 (Fed. Cir. 2020) which involved an NDA that contained several clauses, some of which ended up being more important than others.

At the beginning of their engagement in or around 2006-2007, SiOnyx was a startup and Hamamatsu was an established manufacturer interested in the technology that SiOnyx was developing. The parties entered into an NDA to allow them to share confidential ... Read More ›