A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


Entries for tag: Settlement

Update on Judge Andrews' Order to File Settlement Agreements to Determine Damages After Default

Andrew E. Russell, June 22, 2021
Damages Settlement Agreements

Last month we wrote about Judge Andrews' order that a plaintiff who won a default judgment against Aston Martin, LLC must file any settlement agreements from seven other patent suits, in order to help the Court determine the proper damages award.

Plaintiff has now responded.

We wondered in our last post whether the Court would permit plaintiff to file under seal. The answer is yes: the Court found the following short paragraph from the briefing to be sufficient to permit filing the settlement agreements and settlement amounts under seal:

Good cause exists to seal these Settlement and License Agreements. The Agreements contain confidentiality clauses such that if the documents were not filed under seal, Plaintiff might be in breach …
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You Won a Default Judgment? Congratulations! Now File Your Settlement Agreements.

David M. Fry, May 19, 2021
Damages Settlement Agreements

Checkered Flag
Bas van den Eijkhof, Unsplash

Default judgments are uncommon in Delaware patent cases. In the rare instance where a defendant misses an answer deadline, the issue is typically resolved with minimal court intervention, either because the plaintiff agrees to an extension or the court sets aside the entry of default.

But in a recent case against Aston Martin, LLC (brought by Display Technologies, LLC), it appears that a default judgment might actually be moving forward. (Side note: it isn't clear to us whether the correct legal entity was sued or served, and we take no position on that front.)

The complaint was filed in February 2020, the summons was served in May, and the clerk entered a default in July. The plaintiff eventually moved for a default judgment in December, seeking an award of $75,000 to $1 million (based on damages estimates from a client affidavit).

On Monday, Judge Andrews recognized that it would "be necessary to have a hearing in order to determine the amount of damages[,]" but made clear that he wasn't going to take the plaintiff's word for the damages number ...

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Rothschild Covenant Not to Sue Made Public, Purported to Cover Everyone Who Uses Open Source Software

Andrew E. Russell, Sept. 8, 2020
OSS CNS

Well this is interesting. It's an article by a non-attorney about the GNOME foundation's fight against a suit by a Rothschild NPE. The article links to the settlement agreement and characterizes it as including a covenant not to sue from all Rothschild entities against anyone based on the use of software licensed under all of the biggest open-source licenses.

Last year, a Rothschild entity sued the GNOME foundation for infringement by its product GNOME, which is a well-known open-source component of many GNU/Linux- and Unix-based operating systems.

The parties settled in May 2020, and the press releases and news reports at the time suggested that the settlement protected other open source software from future Rothschild suits.

Now that we …

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