Interval's Patent Suit Against the World Dismissed

randall77 writes with an update to a story we discussed in August about a patent infringement suit filed by Interval Licensing, a firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, against many major tech companies over vague and broadly defined business methods. That patent suit has now been dismissed. Quoting Groklaw: "The court agreed with Google et al that it 'lacks adequate factual detail to satisfy the dictates of Twombly and Iqbal and also 'fails to provide sufficient factual detail as suggested by Form 18.' The court doesn't agree with Allen's Interval Licensing that the two cases do not apply to patent complaints, but it doesn't even need to go there: 'The Court does not find it necessary to determine whether Form 18 is no longer adequate under Twombly and Iqbal because Plaintiff's complaint fails to satisfy either the Supreme Court's interpretation of Rule 8 or Form 18.' Go Google. That was their argument in their motion to dismiss, along with AOL's. Google said the complaint was too vague to meet the standard under Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009) and Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007). Then, after Interval Licensing brought up the lower patent form standard it thought should apply instead, AOL jumped in saying the complaint was too vague under even that standard, and the court agreed.

Comments

Re:"Dictates of Twombly and Iqbal"

[game kid]

I think so, Brain, but how will we mix a burqa with a maid catgirl outfit and still have space for the bombs?

Re:microsoft peculiarity?

[fishexe]

What's Twombly without Iqbal?

The way the law should be, that's what.

I know you were making a joke, but I have to answer seriously because the question is a surprisingly apt one. In Twombly the SCOTUS ruled that you can't just allege facts showing lawful activity and say they constitute a pattern of unlawful activity, you have to allege at least one specific fact that permits the inference of unlawful activity. Under the standard prior to Twombly, your case would only get dismissed if it was clear you could prove "no set of facts" that could support it; naturally, the letter of the law before Twombly said cases could almost never get dismissed for failure to state a claim, but many absurd suits met the "no set of facts" test and judges dismissed them anyway, because they were absurd. So Twombly basically brought the letter of the law (case law, that is) in line with how it had always been applied in practice.

In Iqbal, the court took this a few steps further and ruled that you can't base your cause of action on any "conclusory" statements, that is basically that you have to plead specific facts for every element of your cause of action. They claim to be applying prior law even-handedly, but the dissent (in this 5-4 decision) does a really good job of pointing out how impossible a burden the court is putting on plaintiffs in certain types of actions to know all the details up front. The whole point of discovery is that there are details you can't know when you first file the suit but that will be relevant to the case; under Iqbal you have to know enough details with enough specificity to basically prove your whole case before you get to discovery, for certain types of cases (discrimination is a good example).