Media + Entertainment

U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real of the Central District of California has dismissed, with prejudice, a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Large Audience Display Systems, LLC (LADS) against Pryor Cashman clients Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Tennman Entertainment, LLC and Spears King Pole Inc.

LADS commenced its litigation against the defendants in 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, claiming that Spears, Timberlake and the corporate defendants had, during a series of concerts in 2008-09, infringed upon LADS’s patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,669,346), which covered technology related to a circular set of overhead video display screens on which electronic images would be projected in venues with large audience environments, such as stadiums and arenas.

Pryor Cashman on behalf of Timberlake, Spears and the corporate defendants, successfully moved to have the case transferred to the Central District of California in 2011. Pryor Cashman had also initiated proceedings in the U.S. Patent Office concerning the validity of LADS’s patent and, once the case had been transferred to California, successfully sought and obtained in May 2012 a stay of the litigation pending the conclusion of the Patent Office proceedings.  In those proceedings, defendants had petitioned the Patent Office to conduct an inter partes reexamination of LADS’s underlying utility patent.

The Patent Office granted Pryor Cashman’s petition and, as a consequence of reexamination, was provided by defendants with new prior art that rendered all of the patent claims asserted against them merely “obvious,” and therefore invalid as not inventive.  A Patent Office board comprised of three Examiners agreed with Pryor Cashman’s position and held that all of the patent claims subject to reexamination were invalid.  

LADS’s appeal of the invalidity determination to the Patent Office's Board of Patent Appeals was defeated by Pryor Cashman and was unanimously upheld by the Board on November 3, 2014.  The Patent Office affirmed that determination on March 23, 2015.

On April 22, 2015, LADS went back to the U.S. District Court in California and asked it to lift the stay which had been in place for nearly three years so that LADS could re-open discovery in a last ditch effort to find evidence that would allow it to assert new patent claims that had not been previously asserted and therefore not been determined to be invalid by the Patent Office.  

Pryor Cashman vigorously opposed LADS’s motion to re-open discovery, noting that the Patent Office had already invalidated all of the patent claims initially asserted against defendants and arguing that allowing LADS to assert additional claims against defendants would be improper and unfair. Pryor Cashman urged the Court to lift the stay order so that, rather than re-opening discovery, it could dismiss the case with prejudice because there were no remaining claims of the U.S. Patent which were asserted against defendants.  

Judge Real agreed with the arguments asserted by Pryor Cashman and, on June 16, 2015, denied LADS's motion and dismissed LADS’s action with prejudice.

The Pryor Cashman team was comprised of Partner Andrew Langsam, a member of Pryor Cashman’s IP and Litigation Groups, Partner Brad D. Rose, chair of Pryor Cashman’s Intellectual Property Group, Partner Michael Niborski, a member of Pryor Cashman's IP and Litigation Groups and Litigation Associate Dasha Chestukhin.

To read Judge Real’s decision in the case of Large Audience Display Systems, LLC v. Tennman Productions, LLC, Justin Timberlake, Spears King Pole, Inc., and Britney Spears, Case No. 2:11-cv-03398, please click here. To read the Patent Office’s Board of Patent Appeals’ Decision denying validity of all of the asserted claims by LADS, click here.