Free Report from Courthouse - Warning, Not LTL Approved
A free report from my visit to the Courthouse:
1) Karp was not finished, they had only started with him when the clock struck one and all the mice ran back to their chambers.
2) Steinberg was a hostile witness, so it is no surprise he gave testimony favorable to Rambus.
3) I didn't get to see Weinstein, wondered what he said about damages and a rate? If someone gets that data, please post so we can compare.
All in all I was struck by two things: (a) it is apparent that Hynix wants to show that the "inventions" in suit were really offspring of Steinberg's fertile imagination, and not from any real data from the inventors; (b) I'm not sure how understandable this was to the jurors.
Steinberg did an excellent job defending the patents, no mistake about it. But he did have his rather... weak moments. He pretty much admitted that there is no real description of a "delayed lock loop" in the patent. He had to say that one skilled in the art would "infer" it was there. But the problem is, he is not one skilled in the art, and he ackwnowledged never talking to either Horowitz or Farmwald about it. Ergo, Hynix wants to paint him as some kind of rogue money grubber who, under pressure from Karp's "we must get better patents quickly..." program simply wanted to impress Rambus with how creative he could be.
Ditto for "dual edge clocking" - he went round and round in circles, but there really is no such terminology anywhere in the patent. I think even the jury could figure out he was just making this up... So again he had to say that he thought it was inherently there, and Furniss pointed out that at one time Steinberg said in a deposition that " any EE with a "scintilla of intelligence" could see it there.
Well Hynix points out that then begs the question of why none of the skilled engineers at Rambus, or even the inventors, "saw" such invention for more than 9 years until Steinberg shows up. I suspect they are going to grill Karp, too, on the fact that his list of "new patents" to file in 1998 makes no mention of the DLL concept for example. If it was not apparent to him, Mr. DRAM designer, how was it "apparent" to a lawyer?
But all of this supposes that the jury understood any of this. From a visceral perspective Steinberg came across very well, so a lot of this detail may escape the jury or.... they may simply not care. I see this case much more critically than they do, so don't take my reactions as representative of theirs.
He also made some crazy comment to the effect that he never consults with inventors before filing new continuation cases? He said this to make it seem SOP that he did not talk to F&H. Let me assure this audience: this is either an outright fabrication, or Steinberg enjoys flirting with malpractice. If an attorney files a case, for example, based solely on his impression of what he/she thinks is patentable, and without consulting the inventors, I daresay that person will be in for a rude awakening. The PTO requires, for example, that the attorney confirm the inventorship of the claims as part of the filing; i.e., if there are two inventors named, please make sure that BOTH contributed to the application. Well, if you didn't bother asking either inventor, that seems like a rather signicant omission. That is definitely NOT SOP in the patent prosecution business, I was surprised he would say that. Again, though, I doubt this would even cause a blip on the juror's radar...
So I am left at the end of the day shaking my head, thinking, Steinberg is very creative, clever and charismatic, and that might be enough for him to pull it off... From reading the jurors, it did not appear that they grasped even 10% of what Hynix was trying to do... It sure didn't seem to rouse TDOX too much, the poor guy looks like he hasn't slept in a week, and he seemed to doze off for more than half the testimony.
Da Greek
PS: Danforth showed up late, pops open his Crackberry and starts whirring through his notes in plain view. I was astonished that a lawyer was not a wee bit more careful since I was sitting right next to him and he doesn't know me from Adam.
