Dow Jones & Co. scored a nice win in federal court today when a judge ruled that it could not have infringed several patents belonging to a British company because the patents are invalid.
The former parent company of The Wall Street Journal, now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., had sought a declaratory judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after London-based Ablaise threatened to sue it for patent infringement related to Web-based programs used on Marketwatch.com and WSJ.com. Other companies had agreed to take licenses with Ablaise, but Dow Jones refused to strike a deal.
“Dow Jones decided that it believed the patents were invalid and that it wasn’t going to pay ransom to avoid the costs of litigation,” said Steven Lieberman, a partner at Washington’s Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, which represented Dow Jones.
Senior Judge James Robertson agreed. In granting Dow Jones' motion for summary judgment, he found that the relevant claims of one patent were obvious and the relevant claims of the other were anticipated by the prior art.
The judge also said that Ablaise had operated “a coercive licensing scheme that has more to do with the costs of litigation than with the novelty of the patent.”
Lawyers for Ablaise could not immediately be reached for comment.
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