Cisco denied a new trial against Patent Infringement Ruling

Cisco has been recently denied a new trial. It suffered a huge loss of record of about $1.9 billion patent case against Virginian start-up Centripetal Networks in the month of October of 2020.

The famous Nasdaq-listed tech company decided to submit a motion for the purpose of a new trial on the 2nd Day of November 2020. The company wants to challenge rulings of the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the US District Courts, on the matter involving US patent numbers 9,500,176 and 9,203,806. It also asked the court to reconsider the aspect of willfulness and damages in the prior ruling of Virginia.

Cisco argued in the court, “The court's decision on fixing the date of our first infringement was sua sponte - or that the court had taken notice of an issue on our own motion without prompting or suggestion from the parties involved.”

However, the court said, “Cisco’s damages expert, Dr. Stephen Becker, agreed that June 20, 2017, would have been the first date of infringement for at least some of the patents at issue.”

In a response to Cisco’s motion for a new trial, district judge Henry Morgan Jr. however denied all the pleas of Cisco and further reinstated the court’s prior ruling on the 17th day of March. He claimed at the end that this court undoubtedly will enter final judgment in favor of Centripetal Networks only.

Everything started when Centripetal Networks initially filed a complaint against Cisco Systems in the month of February 2018 where it alleged that Cisco committed an infringement of 11 of its US cybersecurity patents.

Later Cisco requested the concerned authorities to review nine of the patents. The US Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) however invalidated claims after proper investigations on several of the patents. Proceedings took one step ahead on other five of the patents which were not under the review i.e., US patent numbers 9,137,205, 9,203,806, 9,500,176, 9,686,193 and 9,917,856.

Judge Morgan in the final stage of the proceedings issued a ruling in favor of Centripetal making observations that Cisco willfully infringed four out of the five asserted patents and later also awarded Centripetal a sum of the amount equivalent to $1.9 billion in damages, as well as a running royalty of nearly 10% on the apportioned sales of Cisco products related to the patents for consecutive three years.