The Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Texas is notorious for its support of patent trolls, and Judge Rodney Gilstrap is notorious for this even among the judges in that district.<\/p>\n
Personally, he has literally been the judge presiding about \u00bc of all patent cases in the United States<\/a>.<\/p>\n He also has a history of taking Supreme Court solutions and applying them in remarkably bad faith.<\/p>\n Case in point, when, in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International<\/i>, the Supreme Court ruled that patents that just added a computer to ordinary activities are invalid, Gilstrap required that defendants ask for his permission before filing to have a patent dismissed<\/a>, which appears to functionally eviscerate the Supreme Court ruling, which calls for a quick dismissal of bogus patents:<\/p>\n For companies that get hit with lawsuits over obvious patents, the best chance they’ve got to fight back is last year’s Supreme Court decision in Alice v. CLS Bank<\/i>. Now patent defendants are often able to get a judge’s opinion at an early stage of the case about whether the patent was too obvious to grant in the first place. <\/p>\n Patent cases still aren’t cheap, but for those willing to fight, Alice<\/i> is turning the tide in defendants’ favor\u2014just not in East Texas. <\/p>\n US District Court Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who presides in Marshall (pop. 25,000), hears more patent cases than any other judge in the country. He has gone out of his way to place additional barriers in the way of defendants seeking to knock out bad patents under Section 101 of the patent laws. That’s the section that Alice relates to, which the Supreme Court said should be used to knock out “do it on a computer”-style patents. <\/p>\n Recently, Gilstrap published an order<\/a> saying any defendant who wants to file an early motion under Section 101 “may do so only upon a grant of leave from the Court after a showing of good cause, which shall be presented through the letter briefing process.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Under pressure, he subsequently partially reversed himself<\/a>, but it’s still pretty out of line.<\/p>\n