Court Issues Judgment Favoring CMU

Case Filed:  March 3, 2009

Case Closed: May 7, 2014

Court: Western District of Pennsylvania

Judge: Nora Barry Fischer

Case Summary:

Carnegie Mellon University(CMU) alleged two of their the ‘839 and the ‘180 patents were infringed by Marvell Technology Group, Ltd. and Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. Marvell is a California based corporation engaged in designing and developing digital integrated circuits.

Patent in suit:

The patents involved in the suit are:

Patent Number	Title	Issue Date	Expiration Date*	Current Assignee+
US6201839	Method and apparatus for correlation-sensitive adaptive sequence detection	Mar 13, 2001	Apr 3, 2018	Carnegie Mellon University
US6438180	Identifying and requesting data in network using identifiers which are based on contents of data	Aug 20, 2002	Mar 1,  2019	Carnegie Mellon University

Assignee information sourced from MaxVal’s Assignment Database.

As in Complaint:

CMU alleged that Marvell directly and indirectly infringed the ‘839 and the ‘180 patents, without permission or authority from it. CMU also alleged that Marvell is involved in various business activities such as selling, offering to sell, contributing to others use and sale of, inducing others to use and sell their material part constituting in their products/integrated circuits namely: Marvell s 88C3000, 88C3100, 88C4200, 88C4300, 88C5500, 88C5520, 88C7500, 88C7500M, and 88i5520 within the United States.

CMU also adds    Marvell’s foregoing acts of infringement have been and continue to be willful and deliberate. CMU has been damaged by the foregoing acts of infringement of its patents by the defendant and will continue to be damaged by such infringement unless enjoined by this Court.

District Court Judgment:

The court ordered that CMU will recover from Marvell, a total sum of $1,535,889,387.60, which includes: the jury’s verdict of $1,169,140,271; supplemental damages of $79,550,288.00 for the period from Jul 29, 2012 through and including Jan 14, 2013; enhanced damages of $287,198,828.60 together with post-judgment interest on the $1,248,690,559.00.

It was further ordered that, from Jan 15, 2013 until the expiration of the patents, an ongoing royalty will be awarded at $0.50 for each MNP-type chip or NLD-type chip sold by Marvell.

Marvell is required to submit a joint status report in Aug 2014, detailing all Marvell’s sales (worldwide).

Appeal court Proceedings:

On May 20, 2014 an appeal was filed by Marvell challenging the district court’s decision favoring and awarding damages to CMU. 

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* Expected expiration date. Patent Term Estimator is a free web-based tool that automatically calculates patent terms and expiration dates for U.S. utility patents.

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