Author: Joe Mullin

Family networking service Life360 won a patent trial earlier this year against a Florida company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS) that sued it for patent infringement. Now it has won a significant chunk of its legal fees for fighting the case.

Yesterday, US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks ordered AGIS to pay Life360 the sum of $684,190.25. That amount represents the legal fees paid from November 21, 2014, when Middlebrooks issued a claim construction order, through the end of the trial on March 13, 2015.

"This was an exceptionally weak case, especially with respect to the asserted method claims, which were the only claims remaining after claim construction," wrote Middlebrooks in his fee order (PDF). "Every claim could only be performed by multiple users, even though infringement requires that "a single party performed each and every step of the claim." He continued:

New patent lawsuits hit an all-time high in November, with many plaintiffs likely hoping to avoid new pleading rules that came into effect yesterday. A whopping 790 lawsuits were filed last month, with at least 212 filed on a single day: Monday, November 30.

For those who watch the patent landscape, it will come as no surprise that most of the lawsuits filed last month come courtesy of "patent trolls"—oddly named LLCs with no business other than litigation. Also no surprise: a big majority of the cases were filed in Eastern Texas.

The huge jump, and in particular the November 30 spike, is likely tied to significant changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for patent cases, which took effect on December 1. The changes by the Judicial Conference of the United States will require patent plaintiffs to provide more information in their lawsuits to survive a motion to dismiss. In particular, the lenient "Form 18" has been eliminated in patent cases. That form allowed patent lawsuits to be filed without naming which specific claims were infringed, or naming a specific product accused of infringing.

In a sharply worded opinion (PDF), a panel of appeals judges has ordered Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart to stop his campaign seeking to "crush" Backpage.com's adult advertisement section.

Ars last wrote about the dispute between Dart and Backpage in July, when US District Judge John Tharp Jr. issued a temporary restraining order stopping some of Dart's pushier behavior, when he confronted Visa and Mastercard over their relationships with Backpage. But Tharp changed his tune the following month, denying Backpage a preliminary injunction that would have stopped Dart from trying to "coerce, threaten, or intimate repercussions" to card companies or other financial institutions. The credit card companies stayed away from Backpage.

US Circuit Judge Richard Posner, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, writes today that the district court judge was wrong, and he grants Backpage the injunction it sought. In Posner's view, Dart was using his power as sheriff of a populous county to bully payment processors into backing away from a site that hosted ads he didn't like, a clear violation of the First Amendment. It's telling, Posner writes, that Dart didn't just sue Backpage.com. Dart had already tried that strategy against Craigslist, and lost.