Fenwick & West LLP is pleased to announce the recent court ruling in favor of its client XpressBet, an account-wagering company, in the patent infringement case filed by Television Games Network (TVG). The ruling summary is featured in the article "Court Rules Against TVG in Patent Case" on the Daily Racing Forum website.
TVG, while operating as ODS Technologies, applied for several patents in the mid-1990s to cover their development of an interactive television wagering system. Since that time, several other companies, such as XpressBet, exploited the Internet's efficiency and cost-effective methods for accepting wagers online. In 2007, TVG filed a lawsuit claiming that XpressBet, owned by Magna Entertainment Corp., was infringing its patents with its online horse race wagering forum.
A federal district court recently ruled that TVG's patents do not apply to systems taking bets placed over the Internet and are limited to wagering technologies for television devices.
Although TVG claims that its patents were meant to cover Internet betting, the court found instead that "the consistency with which the patentees described their invention as reliant on existing television distribution systems, and the absence of any reference to alternative distribution methods...persuades the court that the patentees intended the disputed claim to refer to a television distribution medium, different in kind from Internet-based video and data distributions."
The Fenwick & West patent litigation team representing XpressBet include Darryl Woo, Virginia DeMarchi, Ilana Rubel, Carolyn Chang, Mashhood Rassam and Lauren Whittemore.
Fenwick & West attorneys have handled some of the most prominent IP litigation over the past two decades, including securing one of the largest IP litigation settlements of 2005—a $400M settlement for its client Compuware against IBM—and one of the largest patent verdicts of the past eighteen months, a $74.7M patent litigation verdict for client Asyst Technologies against Jenoptik. The firm is ranked by Managing Intellectual Property as one of the top five West coast firms for IP litigation, by IP Worldwide as one of the top dozen firms that Fortune 500 companies relied on for IP litigation, and was recently awarded "Most Innovative Use of Technology by a Law Firm" by American Lawyer Media for the firm's proprietary electronic discovery tools.