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June 2014: Complete Defense Verdict for Google in Delaware Patent Jury Trial

June 2014

The firm won a complete defense verdict for Google Inc. in a patent case in the District of Delaware. The litigation concerned Google’s search and advertising systems, and YouTube. In 2009, the plaintiff Personalized User Model, LLC (“PUM”) filed suit. PUM alleged that Google infringed three of its patents relating to personalization services. Over the course of the litigation, PUM claimed that seven different Google products infringed these patents, and multiple different functionalities within those products. Google won summary judgment of non-infringement of one of the three asserted patents, and PUM dropped its claims against several of the accused products. At the time of trial, PUM was accusing Google Search, Search Ads, Content Ads, and YouTube of infringing 11 claims of the two remaining patents.

In addition to arguing non-infringement, the firm responded to PUM’s infringement claims by asserting that the asserted claims are invalid as anticipated by the prior art, and obvious in light of the prior art. On behalf of Google, the firm also filed parallel inter partes re-examinations with the Patent & Trademark Office. At the time of trial, every single asserted claim stood rejected by the PTO on many grounds. Quinn Emanuel further brought a breach of contract claim against one of the named inventors for failure to assign the patent to his former employer SRI International, after Google acquired SRI’s rights to the patents-in-suit and related causes of action.

The jury unanimously agreed with Quinn Emanuel and Google on all issues. The jury found that the inventor breached his employment agreement with SRI by failing to assign the patents, that not one of Google’s accused products infringed a single asserted claim, that the asserted claims are invalid as anticipated by three different prior art references, and the asserted claims are invalid as obvious in light of the prior art.