Another $400B Damages Award for Dr. Saffran
At the close of January, after a mere two-hour deliberation, a federal jury found that Johnson & Johnson's and Cordis Corporation's drug-eluting stents infringed on Dr. Bruce Saffran's patent. In January of 2008, another federal jury came to the same conclusion in a suit against Boston Scientific.
The two awards exceed $900M, and according to Dickstein Shapiro, LLP, attorneys for the plaintiff, the related revenues of the products violating the referenced patent exceded $20B.
Most of the news for this award comes from the Dickstein Shapiro LLP Press Release. Many blogs and news agencies have picked up the report without doing much in the way of fact checking, so the patent referenced in the Press Release (No. 5,363,760) is widely reported in the lay and medical press and related blogs. Unfortunately, that patent is for a rotor unit for a postage meter machine, hardly a device, we presume, that could prolong someone's life. A check of the 2007 filing yields the correct Patent No. 5653760, "Method and Apparatus for Managing Macromolecular Distribution." We can only imagine the frenzy in the law firm as they try to staff up to take advantage of all of the postage machine infringement business coming their way.