Hard Cases

JOSEPH MARGULIES

Cornell law professor Joseph Margulies uses the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta by police to explain some lessons for reform we might learn. Margulies calls upon us to use this case to reexamine the circumstances that should result in a custodial arrest and to shrink the function of police so as to use them only in the very few situations that truly require them.

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In Re PersonalWeb Technologies LLC

Court: US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Docket: 19-1918

Opinion Date: June 17, 2020

Judge: William Curtis Bryson

Areas of Law: Intellectual Property, Internet Law, Patents

Personal Web’s patents share a largely common specification and claim priority to an abandoned patent application, which was filed in 1995. According to the specification, there was a problem with the way computer networks identified data in their systems. There was “no direct relationship between the data names” and the contents of the data item. Computer networks could become clogged with duplicate data, and the efficiency and integrity of data processing systems could be impaired. The inventors purported to solve this problem by devising “True Names” for data items. The system created a “substantially unique” identifier for each data item that depended only on the content of the data itself and did not depend on purportedly less reliable means of identifying data items, such as user-provided file names. PersonalWeb sued Amazon for patent infringement. After the district court issued its claim construction order, PersonalWeb stipulated to the dismissal of all its claims against Amazon with prejudice; the court subsequently entered judgment against PersonalWeb. In 2018, PersonalWeb filed dozens of new lawsuits against website operators, many of which were Amazon’s customers. Amazon intervened. The Federal Circuit affirmed a declaratory judgment that PersonalWeb’s lawsuits against Amazon’s customers were barred as a result of the prior lawsuit brought by PersonalWeb against Amazon.