Alison Frankel

In the two weeks since U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb of Madison, Wisconsin, unceremoniously tossed Apple’s breach-of-contract against Motorola just as a trial to determine a fair licensing rate for Motorola’s standard-essential wireless tech patents was to begin, Apple’s lawyers at Covington & Burling andTensegrity Law Group have been struggling to persuade the judge to change her mind and dismiss the case without prejudice. I already told you about the bench memo Apple submitted on Nov. 5, after Crabb said at a hearing that if Apple wouldn’t agree to abide by the licensing rate she set, she would dismiss its declaratory judgment and specific performance claims. Apple argued, in essence, that since Crabb was dismissing on jurisdictional grounds, she hadn’t reached the merits of Apple’s case, so she couldn’t preclude Apple from refiling its claims. Apple repeated those arguments in a brief filed last week, responding to a Nov. 14 brief by Motorola’s lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan that urged Crabb to stick by her decision to toss the case with prejudice. “No litigant,” Motorola wrote, “should be permitted to try to engineer a judgment to its liking on the eve of the trial, then seek to walk away so that it can reengineer and refile its claims elsewhere, at some later date.”

That might seem like the same old bomb-throwing by two companies that have spent the last three years (and untold millions of dollars) attempting to litigate the other’s smart devices into oblivion, but last week’s briefing, as well as another brief Motorola filed Monday, revealed something new: a tantalizing step toward arbitration that could be, to quote Winston Churchill, the end of the beginning of the smartphone patent wars.

Don’t get too excited, because Apple and Motorola are still squabbling over the terms of such an arbitration. But here’s where things stand. At the Nov. 5 hearing before Crabb, Motorola suggested, apparently for the first time in open court, that it would be willing to submit to binding arbitration to set a fair and reasonable licensing rate for both its portfolio of patents essential to wireless technology and Apple’s corresponding portfolio. Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell followed up with a letter on Nov. 8 to Motorola GC Kent Walker(cc’ing Google lawyer David Drummond). “Your offer to arbitrate made before Judge Crabb on November 5, 2012, was … welcome news,” the Apple letter said. “We agree to arbitrate the value of mutual licenses to our respective (standard-essential patent) portfolios.”

Apple suggested certain conditions, however. It wanted the arbitration to cover all standard-essential patents held by Motorola and Apple, to “ensure an efficient process.” It called for a common royalty base that takes into account the relative importance of the patents at issue. And it called for a worldwide “litigation stand down,” in which both sides would agree not to seek injunctions or licensing rate determinations on any standard-essential patents in any court until the arbitration is complete. Specifically, Apple’s Sewell s aid Motorola’s ongoing rate case in Germany would have to be stayed.

Motorola’s Walker replied to Apple’s letter on Nov. 13. He said his company was looking for an even broader resolution of the patent dispute, encompassing all of the intellectual property Motorola and Apple have accused one another of misappropriating. But if Apple wanted to arbitrate just standard-essential licenses, Motorola had a few conditions of its own. One involved a suit Apple has filed in federal court in San Diego, claiming that it is entitled to fair and reasonable license from Motorola by virtue of an agreement between Motorola and the chip maker Qualcomm. Motorola’s Nov. 13 letter said that any standstill agreement would have to encompass Apple’s case in San Diego. Motorola also said, however, that its rate-setting case in Germany, in which there’s already a well-developed record, should continue — and should even, perhaps, simply be extended so that the German court’s findings would apply worldwide. In addition, Motorola’s letter said that the arbitration panel should have the power to set a royalty base and rate without any preconditions. “In short,” the Motorola letter said, “this proceeding would be the forum for all issues between us relating to the use of and payment for either party’s (standard-essential patents).” (Groklaw, which was thefirst to report on the disclosure of potential arbitration, contended that Google is controlling Motorola’s position. “Google’s reply,” Groklaw said, “makes it clear (that) there will be a real deal or none. Google didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.”)

I know Apple is a brilliantly managed company represented by brilliant outside counsel. But I cannot for the life of me figure out Apple’s endgame strategy in its breach-of-contract case against Motorola in federal court in Madison, Wisconsin.

Apple had a chance to mitigate Google’s leverage from Motorola’s standard-essential patents in the smartphone wars. Instead, it squandered more than 18 months of litigation, refusing on the eve of trial to agree to abide by the court’s determination of a fair and reasonable royalty rate for Motorola’s IP unless U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb set a rate of no more than $1 per iPhone. As a result, Crabb dismissed Apple’s case Monday, on the day she was to have begun a bench trial on Apple’s breach-of-contract claim. Her ruling means Apple may not be able to bring similar claims against Motorola in any other U.S. court, which robs the iPhone maker of powerful leverage in the global smart device war.

From my reading of Crabb’s orders and Apple’s responses in the week leading to Monday’s dismissal, Apple must have known it was at extreme risk of this outcome. The chain of events began with Crabb’s 57-page decision on Oct. 29, which outlined the scope of the trial that was scheduled to begin the following week. Apple’s lawyers at Covington & Burling and Tensegrity Law Group should have been happy with Crabb’s ruling, which held that Apple could, indeed, compel Motorola to offer Apple a license for its standard-essential IP on fair and reasonable terms. Specific performance, as that relief is known, is extraordinary in a breach-of-contract case, Crabb acknowledged, but she said that the circumstances of this dispute, in which the two sides are manifestly incapable of negotiation, justify it. Crabb went on to say (like U.S. District Judge James Robartof Seattle in Microsoft’s parallel breach-of-contract case against Motorola) that she would first have todetermine a fair licensing rate for Motorola’s patents and would then decide whether Motorola breached its obligation to license the IP to Apple on reasonable terms. If she found Motorola in breach, she said, she might order it to offer its IP to Apple on the terms she set.

The next great turning point in the war for global device domination comes next month, when Motorola faces two trials – one against Apple, the other against Microsoft – that will determine its ability to use its portfolio of standard-essential patents as leverage in IP disputes with its competitors. I’ve been harping on this theme for a while, but trials have a way of sharpening the issues. Both of these cases will be tried to judges, not juries, so we won’t get immediate results. But when U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb in Madison, Wisconsin, and U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle issue rulings, Motorola and its rivals should have a very clear understanding of how valuable Motorola’s patents on essential wireless technology are.

The Apple trial — which will decide whether Motorola breached its agreements with international standard-setting bodies by failing to license essential technology to Apple on fair and reasonable terms — is scheduled to begin in Wisconsin on Nov. 5, but the Microsoft case in Seattle, which begins on Nov. 13, could hold greater industrywide interest. When he denied summary judgment to both Microsoft and Motorola in June, Robart said he needed more information about what exactly constitutes a fair licensing deal on standard-essential technology before he could ask a jury to decide whether Motorola breached its obligation to license its IP to Microsoft. He called for a bench trial to determine a reasonable royalty rate — an exercise that will likely expose Motorola’s licensing agreements with other counterparties and will certainly give every other Motorola licensee a starting point in future negotiations.

Over the summer, Motorola’s lawyers at Ropes & Gray and the Summit Law Group attempted to reshape the bench trial before Robart. In a motion for summary judgment they filed in July, the Motorola lawyers said that Robart’s proposed rate-setting exercise would improperly set the terms of a contract that does not exist between Microsoft and Motorola. “There is no existing licensing contract between Motorola and Microsoft,” they wrote. “Instead, Motorola submits that there is simply a right to a license. Thus, there is no existing contract for the court to interpret or in which the court can merely ‘fill in’ gaps.”

By Alison Frankel and Dan Levine

Samsung doesn’t want you to know why it believes juror misconduct tainted the $1.05 billion verdict that a San Jose federal court jury delivered to Apple in August. Its lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan redacted that entire section of the motion for judgment as a matter of law that they filed Friday with U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California. But from a close examination of the statute and cases Samsung cited in the redacted section, we’ve discerned Samsung’s two-pronged argument for juror misconduct: The nine-person jury improperly considered extraneous evidence during deliberations and jury foreman Velvin Hogan failed to disclose in voir dire that he was involved in 1993 litigation with a former employer that led him and his wife to declare personal bankruptcy.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday about Samsung’s secret new allegations, Hogan, an engineer, confirmed that he was a party in two cases cited in Samsung’s brief, a 1993 case from municipal court in Santa Cruz titled Seagate Technology v. Hogan and a 1993 federal bankruptcy case titled In re Velvin R. Hogan. According to Hogan, when Seagate hired him in the 1980s and he moved from Colorado to California, his new employer agreed to split the cost of paying off the mortgage on his Colorado home. But after Hogan was laid off in the early 1990s, he told us, Seagate claimed he owed the company that money. Hogan said he sued Seagate for fraud, Seagate countersued, and he ultimately declared personal bankruptcy to protect his house.

Can Quinn Emanuel credibly argue that Koh needs to hold a hearing to determine whether Hogan’s failure to disclose the 1993 litigation is grounds to throw out an unrelated patent infringement verdict for Apple? Again, we don’t know precisely what Samsung’s argument is, but several of the cases it cited in the new brief’s table of authorities concern juror bias and the failure to disclose relevant information in the jury selection process. In U.S. v. Perkins, for instance, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1984 that the defendant in a criminal obstruction of justice case was entitled to a new trial because a juror didn’t reveal that he had previously been both a defendant in a civil case over stolen union funds and a witness in a criminal case involving the firebombing of a union hall. In a 1989 2nd Circuit ruling called U.S. v. Colombo, the court called for an evidentiary hearing on whether a juror deliberately failed to disclose that her brother-in-law was a government prosecutor in order to get on the jury, and held that if she hid her ties to the government, convictions in a huge Mafia racketeering case must be vacated.

On Wednesday, Reuters confirmed what it first reported last month: Apple and four book publishers have offered to settle a European Commission investigation of price-fixing in the market for e-books. That’s particularly notable because Apple and two of those publishers – Macmillan and Viking – have refused to settle with the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, which reached an agreement last April with three other publishers accused of conspiring with Apple to change the pricing model for e-books. Neither the DOJ settlement nor the proposed EC deal involve a financial penalty, so why would Apple, Viking and Macmillan agree to settle with antitrust regulators from the European Union but not their U.S. counterparts?

Two reasons: EC procedure and U.S. liability.

First, a caveat. I reached out to Macmillan’s lawyers at Sidley Austin, Penguin’s counsel at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld and Apple’s lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, but none would comment, nor did Apple respond to a request for comment. In other words, I’m offering informed speculation rather than from-the-horse’s-mouth reporting.

That said, consider the way antitrust cases proceed at the EC, which is the trade section of the European Union. After regulators complete their investigation and conclude that defendants have engaged in anti-competitive behavior, they have the power to levy a fine before there’s any court ruling on liability. Those fines, moreover, can be huge. In 2008, the EC levied a $1.3 billion penalty against Microsoft for failing to comply with a previous EC directive to permit competitors to run programs on Windows. The following year European regulators set a new record with a $1.4 billion fine for the accused chip monopolist Intel.

There is no federal judge more economically outspoken than Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, who in his scant spare time co-authors a provocative blog with the Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist Gary Becker. With a high-pitched querulous voice and no tolerance for obfuscation, Posner can demolish lawyers he considers economics slackers. If you’ve got a dubious theory of damages, you’d better hope you don’t end up arguing it before him.

But I’d bet neither Apple nor Motorola thought their damages theories were particularly unusual in the patent infringement cases Posner tossed Friday, sitting by designation in federal district court in Chicago. The lawyers on both sides (who didn’t return my calls seeking their comments) are, after all, veterans of the smartphone patent wars: Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan for Motorola; Covington & Burling, Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Tensegrity Law Group (Matt Powers‘s new shop) for Apple. Motorola made basically the same damages argument against Apple that it has asserted in litigation with Microsoft in federal court in Seattle, claiming that it’s due more than 1 percent of iPhone sales for Apple’s infringement of a standard-essential Motorola patent on communications between cellphones and cellular towers. Apple, meanwhile, offered an economic consultant’s analysis of what it might have cost Motorola to license or work around its patents for digital signal processing and recognition of embedded phone numbers and Web addresses.

Nevertheless, according to Posner’s 38-page opinion, neither side made a legally sufficient case for damages. That, in turn, doomed both sides’ requests for injunctions. With neither an injunction nor money damages an option for Apple or Motorola, Posner said any judgment on the validity or infringement of the patents at issue “would have no practical effect” and dismissed both suits with prejudice.

It’s not easy for antitrust plaintiffs to get past a defense motion to dismiss. Before the U.S. Supreme Court raised the pleading standard for everyone in Ashcroft v. Iqbal in 2009, it imposed that tough burden on antitrust claimants in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, a 2007 opinion that held it’s not enough just to argue that alleged conspirators engaged in parallel price-fixing. Under Twombly, antitrust complaints have to offer detailed and specific facts to support a plausible argument that defendants colluded to restrict competition.

On Wednesday evening, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of San Francisco federal court ruled that software engineers in a putative class action against Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, Adobe, and Pixar met that high standard. As the judge explained in her 29-page opinion, it certainly helped the plaintiffs that the defendants all entered consent decrees with the Justice Department in 2010, agreeing to end their practice of restricting cold calls to recruit one another’s engineers. But what really convinced the judge not to dismiss the engineers’ case was the “significant influence” of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs; Google chairman and Apple board member Eric Schmidt; and Apple and Google director Arthur Levinson.

At least one of those three men, Koh said, had a hand in each of the six bilateral anti-poaching agreements among the defendants. “Their overlapping board membership lends plausibility to plaintiffs’ allegations that each defendant entered into this conspiracy ‘with knowledge of the other defendants’ participation in the conspiracy, and with the intent of . . . reduc(ing) employee compensation and mobility through eliminating competition for skilled labor,’” the judge wrote.

Has there ever been a price-fixing case in which the alleged conspirators agreed to take less money for their product and simultaneously up their production and boost competition? The answer to that question may determine the success of the Justice Department‘s e-books antitrust suit against Apple and the two publishers that have not agreed to settle DOJ’s civil charges.

On Friday, Apple and three publishers filed reply briefs in their effort to win dismissal of the private antitrust class action that parallels the Antitrust Division’s case. Those filings, coming two days after the government brought suit, offer good hints at how defense lawyers for Apple and the publishers will counter the Justice Department’s allegations. (Interestingly, Hachette and Harper Collins — the two publishers that have reached a tentative $52 million settlement with 16 state Attorneys General — did not sign the joint publishers’ motion, which suggests that they may argue their AG deal resolves the class action plaintiffs’ damages claims.)

The essence of the government’s case (as well as the private class action) is that the publishers regarded Apple’s entry into the e-books market as a chance to break Amazon’s 90-percent monopoly. As part of that effort, the publishers allegedly conspired with Apple to change the e-books model from the wholesale pricing Amazon insisted upon to so-called “agency pricing,” in which publishers set prices and Apple received a commission for every e-book it sold. Both the class action and the government suit assert that Apple and the publishers engaged in what’s known as “per se” price-fixing, which means that plaintiffs must only prove there was a conspiracy to restrain competition and raise prices. The Justice Department and private plaintiffs claim the proof of the conspiracy is the rise in e-book prices after the publishers all signed agency-pricing deals with Apple, from $9.99 to $12.99 or $14.99 for new titles.

With a single ruling this week, U.S. District Judge James Robart of Seattle federal court may have fundamentally altered the balance of power between Motorola Mobility and the leading opponents of Motorola’s soon-to-be-parent Google, Microsoft and Apple.

In another indication that the smartphone war is shifting away from individual infringement suits, Robart granted Microsoft’s motion for a temporary restraining order, which effectively bars Motorola from acting to enforce whatever relief it’s granted in an ongoing German patent case. In that case, before a court in Mannheim, Motorola has claimed Microsoft Windows and Xbox products infringe German patents that are part of Motorola’s standard-essential portfolio. The Seattle judge, according to this transcript of the order he issued in open court, agreed with Microsoft that the German patents are already at issue in Microsoft’s case before him, which accuses Motorola of breaching its obligation to offer standard-essential patents on fair and reasonable licensing terms.

Robart granted the TRO under the Anti-Suit Act, which is intended to restrict forum-shopping and harassing litigation. That’s how Microsoft and its counsel at Sidley Austin described Motorola’s German suit. According to Microsoft, Motorola first tried to extract exorbitant licensing fees for a portfolio of about 100 worldwide standard-essential patents. Then, after Microsoft filed a Seattle federal-court suit asserting that Motorola’s licensing demand was a breach of its contract with a European standard-setting body, Motorola sued Microsoft in Germany for infringing German patents that were part of the portfolio at issue in Seattle.

The newly-filed Justice Department complaint against Apple and five major publishers is an incalculable boon to Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, the firms that won the intense competition to lead the multidistrict e-books antitrust class action. There hasn’t yet been discovery in the class action, which the defendants have moved to dismiss or send to arbitration, so the specific details in the Antitrust Division’s complaint, including emails and meetings between Apple and publishing executives, are powerful evidence of the conspiracy the class action alleges. The Justice Deparment’s same-day settlement with Hachette Books, Simon & Shuster, and Harper Collins also increases the likelihood that those publishers will also move to resolve the class action and improves the class’s case against Apple and the remaining publishers, Macmillan and Penguin.

There’s another gift to the private lawyers in the DOJ case as well: The Justice Department is not asking for any money damages of its own. Its complaint seeks only a decree that the defendants engaged in an unlawful price-fixing conspiracy, an injunction against such collusive conduct, and costs. The Antitrust Division — which filed its case in Manhattan federal court as a related proceeding to the multidistrict litigation — seems to be leaving money damages entirely in the hands of Hagens Berman and Cohen Milstein.

Steve Berman of Hagens Berman told me in an email that it’s not unusual for the Justice Department “to leave damages to private lawyers.” He also said there had been no discussions between class counsel and the DOJ on what sort of damages the Justice Department would seek. But his firm’s official statement makes clear that the private lawyers also noticed the distinction between what they want and what the Antitrust Division is after: