Feds Owe More Than $4.3 Million in Fees in Oak Ridge Patent Case

The federal government must pay more than $4.3 million in attorneys’ fees and costs based on its unreasonable defense in a patent infringement case involving Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Oak Ridge used information from Hitkansut LLC’s patent application without permission to breach a non-disclosure agreement and apply for its own patent. Consequently, the government’s position that Oak Ridge didn’t infringe the patent at issue was unjustifiable, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled.

Hitkansut owns U.S. Patent No. 7,175,722, related to a method for “changing physical properties of a structure using concurrent application of multiple energy types.”

Hitkansut signed a ...