Invitrogen and Clontech Settle Patent Suit
This settlement marks an end to a legal struggle that began on December 31, 1996 (see IBO 11/30/2006). The jury found that Clontech willfully infringed Invitrogen’s ‘608 Patent and had dismissed Clontech’s defenses of prior invention and obviousness, but the matter of compensation had not yet been decided. Each company will pay its own legal fees.
Carlsbad and Mountain View, CA 5/29/07—Invitrogen and Clontech Laboratories, a unit of Takara Bio, have announced the settlement of Invitrogen’s patent infringement lawsuit against Clontech. The settlement comes one week after a jury decision in a federal district court in Maryland. According to the settlement, Clontech has agreed that Invitrogen’s four patents for “Cloned Genes Encoding Reverse Transcriptase Lacking RNase H Activity”—US Patents Nos. 5,244,797, 5,668,005, 6,063,608 and 5,405,776—are valid and can be enforced. In addition, Clontech has stopped selling its products that use the technology described in the patents, including its PowerScript products. Other terms of the settlement were not announced.
