DEG client Merit prevails with finding of willful patent infringement

JUNE 2008; PHILADELPHIA PENNSYLVANIA – Merit Industries, Inc., a worldwide
leader in touch screen entertainment devices, worked with Dickstein Shapiro and Digital
Evidence Group to obtain a favorable jury verdict in a patent infringement case involving
several patents. After a 2 week trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Pennsylvania before Judge Savage, the jury returned a verdict of roughly $1.5 million,
and found that defendant JVL had willfully infringed, allowing Judge Savage to treble the
damages and award attorney’s fees to Merit.
Digital Evidence Group assisted Merit and its counsel in displaying documents, video
clips from depositions, and video screens from dozens of tabletop video game devices
the defendant had alleged were prior art invalidating Merit’s patents. “I believe it was
helpful for the jury to understand how these video games operated. Having experts
testify while using the games, with the screen being broadcast throughout the courtroom,
was much more effective than trying to explain their operation by just using figures and
drawings from the patents,” said Curt Evans from DEG.
After a short afternoon deliberation, Merit’s chief competitor was found by the jury to
have willfully violated U.S. patent laws by selling products that use Merit’s patented
technologies. Merit Entertainment is headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and
develops and manufactures touch screen video game machines. With an installed base
of over 250,000 touch screen games accounting for over 4 billion plays per year, Merit is
the worldwide leader in touch screen entertainment devices.
Attorneys for Merit were Ken Brothers and Gary Hoffman, head of Dickstein Shapiro’s
Intellectual Property Practice, with whom DEG also worked to secure a $500 million
patent infringement verdict in Saffran v. Boston Scientific.