Court admits image valuation and consumer perception theories with regard to the model and talent industry provided by the Plaintiff’s experts in copyright infringement suit

Wisconsin District Court denied a motion to exclude the Plaintiffs’ expert who used his industry experience to opine on hypothetical negotiation value. The court found his valuation method reliable enough for admission, despite the Defendant’s critiques. It also permitted the Plaintiffs’ survey expert, ruling that flaws in the survey went to evidentiary weight, not admissibility. The Court screens expert testimony for relevance and reliability under Rule 702, not perfection.

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Court limits fire and battery expert testimony in fatal laptop battery explosion case

This case arose from a December 2015 apartment fire in Everett, Washington that was allegedly caused by a lithium-ion laptop battery manufactured by Hewlett-Packard (HP). The plaintiff insurance company brought subrogation claims against HP for negligence and strict product liability under Washington law. The plaintiff retained two expert witnesses who opined that the fire was caused by an internal short circuit in the HP laptop battery, which then ignited surrounding combustible materials. HP filed Daubert motions challenging the admissibility of the two experts’ testimonies. The court excluded some opinions as beyond the experts’ qualifications or based on flawed testing methodology. However, the court found enough expert testimony survived to create factual disputes warranting denial of HP’s motion for summary judgment on the strict liability claim. Thus, the case was allowed to proceed to trial based on the admissible expert opinions that the fire originated on the bed where the laptop was located and may have been caused by the laptop battery.

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Court admits royalty analysis on a convoyed sales approach, denied motion to exclude in Patent Infringement case

In this patent infringement lawsuit, the Court addressed Defendant’s motion to exclude Plaintiff’s damages expert under Daubert and Rule 702. The Defendant argued the expert improperly inflated the value of the patented inventions by including non-infringing products and features in his royalty calculations. However, the Court upheld the expert’s methodology. It found the expert permissibly based his royalty analysis on a convoyed sales approach, including revenue from non-patented maintenance packages that were functionally linked to the accused software. The Court explained convoyed sales principles allow tying non-patented items to patented ones when a close functional relationship exists, without meeting the same stringent standards as the entire market value rule urged by defendant. The Court also affirmed the expert’s apportionment methodology as sufficiently reliable and rejected arguments he failed to account for prior art. It emphasized alleged flaws in an expert’s methodology are better handled by cross-examination rather than exclusion.

The key focus is on summarizing the court’s decision to allow the expert’s testimony over Defendant’s Daubert challenge. The excerpt highlights the court’s findings that the expert reliably applied accepted damages principles and Defendant’s disputes could be addressed through cross-examination at trial.

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  • Recent Expert Challenges

    Expert Challenges, Fire Investigation Expert Witness

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