Month: October 2017

Enlarge / Apple's FaceTime has been found to infringe patents belonging to VirnetX, a public patent-holding company. (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A patent-holding company called VirnetX has won a massive patent case against Apple, for the third time. Today, it became clear just how big the win was.

An order unsealed Friday (PDF) reveals that, not only did a federal judge award VirnetX the full $302 million jury verdict that it won last year, but the judge tacked on $41.3 million in enhanced damages and $96 million in costs, attorneys' fees, and interest. In all, Apple has been ordered to pay a staggering $439.7 million to VirnetX because its VPN on Demand and FaceTime features were found to infringe VirnetX patents.

In a statement today, VirnetX CEO Kendall Larsen said he's "elated" with the court's final judgment.

Enlarge / Allergan's R&D and global production site in Pringy, France. (credit: JEAN-PIERRE CLATOT/AFP/Getty Images)

A federal judge ruled today that patents protecting Allergan's $1.5 billion blockbuster dry-eye drug, Restasis, are abstract and invalid. The international drug company's stock dropped about five percent on the news.

The ruling by US Circuit Judge William Bryson could have wide effects on the patent landscape because the Restasis patents are at the center of a novel legal strategy that involves using Native American sovereignty rights to avoid certain types of patent reviews, called inter partes reviews, or IPRs.

Last month, Allergan gave its six Restasis patents to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, located in northern New York. The tribe was paid $13.5 million up front and promised $15 million annually as long as the patents were valid. Shortly after the transfer, lawyers representing Allergan and the tribe moved to dismiss an IPR against their patents on the grounds that the patents now enjoyed "sovereign immunity."

Enlarge / Rep. Barbara Lee (center) spoke along with Rep. G.K. Butterfield (right) at the San Francisco offices of Hustle on Monday. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

SAN FRANCISCO—Days after two leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus got Facebook to commit to hiring a black member to its board of directors, they again pressed major tech firms to diversify the hiring of executives and rank-and-file employees.

In brief remarks before dozens of assembled employees at the downtown offices of Hustle, a texting startup, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-North Carolina) said Monday morning that they have been meeting with companies including Uber and Salesforce to improve on a longstanding issue of underrepresented minorities in Silicon Valley.

"To our surprise, all of [the companies], without exception, acknowledged that they had a problem and need our help to fix this problem," Butterfield said, noting that he expected other companies to follow Facebook’s example.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Monday rejected Equifax's bid to retain its $7.25 million "taxpayer identity" contract—the one awarded days after Equifax announced it had exposed the Social Security numbers and other personal data of some 145 million people.

At its core, the Equifax-IRS ordeal reveals the strangeness of the government contacting system. That's because Equifax wasn't even originally chosen to continue its contract with the IRS's Secure Access online program, which enables taxpayers to store and retrieve online tax records. But because Equifax protested when the agency gave the contract to rival Experian for a fraction of the cost, the IRS said contracting rules demanded that it offer a "bridge" contact to Equifax until the GAO sorts out the protest.

The GAO sorted everything out on Monday. It set aside the challenge from Equifax which contended that Experian, whose bid was worth up to $795,000 annually, didn't have the technological wherewithal to verify taxpayers signing up for the Secure Access program.

Enlarge / Emissions rise from smokestacks at Pacificorp’s 1,000MW coal-fired power plant on October 9, 2017 outside Huntington, Utah. (credit: George Frey/Getty Images)

Late last week, power company Vistra Energy announced that it would close two of its Texas coal plants by early 2018. In a press release, the company blamed "Sustained low wholesale power prices, an oversupplied renewable generation market, and low natural gas prices, along with other factors."

Just the week before, Vistra subsidiary Luminant had announced another Texas plant closure, according to Reuters. The three Texas coal plants reflect more than 4GW of capacity. The plants are only the latest in a string of announced retirements from power companies that find their coal units offline more and more often due to low electricity prices.

But these closures came at a surprising time: the Trump administration has been pushing some of the most aggressive policies aimed at helping out coal plants that we've seen yet. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) moved to roll back the Clean Power Plan just last week, and, in late September, the Department of Energy proposed a rule that would increase compensation for facilities that can store 90 days of fuel onsite (i.e., coal and nuclear energy). Industry watchers expected the proposed lifelines would forestall exits from coal generation.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bill Hinton)

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) will investigate DDoS attacks that allegedly targeted the Federal Communications Commission's system for accepting public comments on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to roll back net neutrality rules.

Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) requested the investigation in August, and the GAO recently confirmed that it accepted the Schatz/Pallone request.

Among other things, Schatz and Pallone are looking for evidence that the attacks actually happened. The FCC has not "released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an attack occurred," they said in their letter to the GAO.