Standing to Sue

WIAV SOLUTIONS LLC V. MOTOROLA, INC.

• “[T]he touchstone of constitutional standing in a patent infringement suit is whether a party can establish that it has an exclusionary right in a patent that, if violated by another, would cause the party holding the exclusionary right to suffer legal injury.”
  
• “[A] licensee is an exclusive licensee of a patent if it holds any of the exclusionary rights that accompany a patent.”
  
• “Because an exclusive licensee derives its standing from the exclusionary rights it holds, it follows that its standing will ordinarily be coterminous with those rights. Depending on the scope of its exclusionary rights, an exclusive licensee may have standing to sue some parties and not others. For example, an exclusive licensee lacks standing to sue a party for infringement if that party holds a preexisting license under the patent to engage in the allegedly infringing activity. Similarly, an exclusive licensee lacks standing to sue a party who has the ability to obtain such a license from another party with the right to grant it. In both of these scenarios, the exclusive licensee does not have an exclusionary right with respect to the alleged infringer and thus is not injured by that alleged infringer. But if an exclusive licensee has the right to exclude others from practicing a patent, and a party accused of infringement does not possess, and is incapable of obtaining, a license of those rights from any other party, the exclusive licensee’s exclusionary right is violated."
• "This court therefore holds that an exclusive licensee does not lack constitutional standing to assert its rights under the licensed patent merely because its license is subject not only to rights in existence at the time of the license but also to future licenses that may be granted only to parties other than the accused. If the accused neither possesses nor can obtain such a license, the exclusive licensee’s exclusionary rights with respect to that accused party are violated by any acts of infringement that such party is alleged to have committed, and the injury predicate to constitutional standing is met.”

ALFRED E. MANN FOUNDATION FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH V. COCHLEAR CORP.

• “A patent owner may transfer all substantial rights in the patents-in-suit, in which case the transfer is tantamount to an assignment of those patents to the exclusive licensee, conferring standing to sue solely on the licensee.”
  
• “[A] patent owner may grant an exclusive license to his patents under such terms that the license is tantamount to an assignment of the patents to the exclusive licensee. This happens when the exclusive license transfers ‘all substantial rights’ in the patents.
  
• “When [all substantial rights are transferred], the exclusive licensee has sole standing to sue those suspected of infringing the patents’ claims.
  
• “[W]here an exclusive license transfers less than ‘all substantial rights’ in the patents to the exclusive licensee, the exclusive licensee may still be permitted to bring suit against infringers, but the patent owner is an indispensable party who must be joined.”
  
• “[T]he question is whether the license agreement transferred sufficient rights to the exclusive licensee to make the licensee the owner of the patents in question. If so, the licensee may sue but the licensor may not. If not, the licensor may sue, but the licensee alone may not. When there is an exclusive license agreement, as opposed to a nonexclusive license agreement, but the exclusive license does not transfer enough rights to make the licensee the patent owner, either the licensee or the licensor may sue, but both of them generally must be joined as parties to the litigation.”