December 2012: Summary Judgment Victory in Deep9 v. Barnes & Noble, et al.

Quinn Emanuel recently obtained summary judgment of non-infringement of all claims for Barnes & Noble in a patent case brought in Seattle by Deep9 Corporation. The case involved Deep9’s claim that Barnes & Noble’s Nook eReaders infringed two patents related to methods for syncing information between two or more devices in a network.

Quinn Emanuel took over from another firm very late in the case—after claim construction and in the middle of expert discovery—and had just over two weeks to prepare and file Barnes & Noble’s summary judgment motion. Quinn Emanuel focused Barnes & Noble’s motion on a “divided infringement” theory of non-infringement. Quinn Emanuel argued that Barnes & Noble could not be liable for infringement because no single entity carried out all of the steps of Deep9’s asserted patent claims; instead, those steps were carried out, if at all, in part by Barnes & Noble’s servers and in part by users of Nook eReaders, over whom Barnes & Noble had no control with respect to the use of their individual Nook eReaders.

After briefing and oral argument, the district court granted Barnes & Noble’s motion for summary judgment of non-infringement based on Quinn Emanuel’s “divided infringement” theory and entered final judgment, ending the case. The district court’s order is well-reasoned and closely follows each of the arguments the firm made in its briefs and at the hearing. Needless to say, Barnes & Noble is very happy that it decided to bring Quinn Emanuel into the case.