Judge Robinson has issued a memorandum opinion considering summary judgment on several issues in LadaTech, LLC v. Illumina, Inc., C.A. No. 09-627-SLR (D. Del. Jan. 24, 2012). The plaintiff, LadaTech, accused defendants Illumina and Solexa of direct and indirect infringement of a patent directed to a method of amplifying a mixture of different sequence duplex DNA fragments and a method of isolating complex DNA fragments. The claims at issue on summary judgment concerned only the former. The court issued a separate claim construction opinion and considered motions for summary judgment on noninfringement, invalidity, patent expiration, and no anticipation.
Finding that her claim construction order had resolved many of the arguments raised, Judge Robinson refused several bases for summary judgment of noninfringement, because “[t]he infringement dispute is, essentially, one of claim construction.” Id. at 21. She did, however, grant summary judgment with respect to only one of the defendant’s accused products and the use of third party products, finding no “evidence that any customer actually performed the method of the ‘023 patent using [the accused third party product.]” Id. at 27-28.
Judge Robinson also denied the defendants motion for summary judgment of invalidity and expiration of the patent-in-suit. Under the claim construction adopted by the court, there was no dispute that one of the limitations was well known in the art. Therefore, the written description was not inadequate for failure to sufficiently disclose this limitation. Furthermore, she rejected the defendants’ argument that plaintiffs had lost small entity status and paid a deficient fee, and thus their patent had expired. Under Federal Circuit precedent, the court had no obligation or authority to analyze whether a patent has expired due to fee deficiency. Id. at 28-36.
Finally, the court granted the plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment of no anticipation for two separate prior art references. Again, the court found that the claim construction it had adopted had largely resolved the defendants’ arguments regarding both references. Id. at 36-46.
LadaTech, LLC v. Illumina, Inc., C.A. No. 09-627-SLR (D. Del. Jan. 24, 2012).
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