"This case is about toilet paper, and who really pays attention to the design on a roll of toilet paper?" asked Seventh Circuit judge Terence Evans, before flushing Georgia-Pacific's trademark suit against Kimberly-Clark.

A Federal Circuit panel ruled Monday that that generic drug makers Sandoz, Watson Pharmaceuticals, and Lupin Pharmaceuticals could proceed with plans to market versions of Bayer's Yasmin contraceptive.

Rambus and its lawyers at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett, & Dunner aimed to repeat a 2010 win at the ITC, but those hopes were dashed on Wednesday.

Following a truce between video game giant Electronic Arts Inc. and the Collegiate License Company, a new team of lawyers from Munger Tolles & Olson stepped in to represent the NCAA as it continues to battle the players' claims.

Who knew that the Ninth Circuit was hip to the fashionista significance of back-pocket stitching on jeans?

McKesson's lawyers at King & Spalding--sans recently departed K&S partner Paul Clement--will get the chance to argue that patents can be infringed by multiple parties in tandem.

As usual, there was plenty of news about tech patents last week, including the latest developments in the Apple/Samsung fight. But the most interesting story was about a portfolio of patents for grape varieties that's held by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

An International Trade Commission judge didn't just rule that five patents held by Rambus were invalid and unenforceable in a Friday decision. The judge also said that former Rambus execs were "dishonest" and "unreliable" witnesses, and that "not since the long-ago era of the Watergate hearings have the words 'I don't recall' been used so regularly in answering questions under oath." Rambus had asserted the patents against six leading semiconductor manufacturers -- LSI, MediaTek, STMicroelectronics, NVidia, Broadcom, and Freescale -- as well as more than 30 of their downstream customers, including Motorola and Hewlett-Packard.

In a 6-5 en banc decision handed down on Friday, the Federal Circuit revived two patent infringement cases—one brought by Akamai Technologies Inc. against Limelight Networks Inc., and another by McKesson Corp. against Epic Systems Corp. More significantly, the court refined the theory of "induced infringement," ruling that inducement applies even when the steps recited in the patented method were performed by multiple parties.

Nearly two years to the day after Washington, D.C.-based litigation shop Howrey dissolved, the trustee unwinding the defunct firm's Chapter 11 estate has launched the first round of lawsuits aimed at clawing back money earned by former Howrey partners from assignments they brought to the firms where they landed. More suits, and settlement talks, are in the works.