Talk:Lexmark Int'l v. Static Control Components

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Suggest merging Lexmark v. Static Control into this page. There are presently two articles discussing the exact same case. This article is more complete and bears the complete case caption as its title, so it would seem to make sense to merge the shorter page into this one rather than the other way around. Tarmstro99 15:21, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

  • Agree Mneumisi 22:23, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
    • Merger completed & double redirect links fixed. Tarmstro99 17:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Supreme Court review?

The article links to a press release on Static Control's web site, dated June 6, 2005, entitled "Supreme Court Rejects Lexmark's Petition."

I have attempted to verify this information and add a citation to the denial of Lexmark's petition for certiorari. The verification effort, however, has instead revealed that Static Control's press release is inaccurate. I can find no evidence that Lexmark filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in this case. Sources checked include the following:

  • KeyCite on Westlaw. Inputting the citation of the Court of Appeals opinion (387 F.3d 522) should pull up all the history relevant to the case. The trial court's decision shows up, but there is no record evidencing the denial of certiorari. Ordinarily such a record would show up in KeyCite along with the citation to the denial of cert.
  • Party name search on Westlaw. Searching the SCT database (all Supreme Court records) for the party name "Lexmark" pulls up only two hits, neither of which relate to this case.
    • BDT Products, Inc. v. Lexmark Int'l, Inc., 126 S. Ct. 384 (2005), denying cert. to 124 Fed. Appx. 329 (6th Cir. 2005).
    • Lexmark Int'l, Inc. v. Snowden, 533 U.S. 903 (2001), denying cert. to 237 F.3d 620 (6th Cir. 2001).
  • Docket search on the Supreme Court's web site.
    • Searching for "Lexmark" turns up only the BDT Products case, referenced previously.
    • Searching for "Static" turns up no hits.

I suspect that what actually happened in June 2005 is that Lexmark's time to file a petition for certiorari expired with no petition having been filed, and that Static Control merely seized upon the passing of the date for petitioning as the occasion for issuing a press release. Tarmstro99 22:57, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

  • In fact, Lexmark attempted to file a cert petition, but they were out of time and the Court therefore rejected it. 1995hoo (talk) 00:26, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Reference to Supreme Court review reworked in page as merged. Tarmstro99 17:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

The Appelate Decision mentions the LXK "stock ticker" code as appearing in the Toner Loading Program first on Page 12, where it is noted that Lexmark claims to have "creatively inserted" their "stock ticker code" LXK into the source of the Toner Loading Program. This claim is an attempt to show that the TLP meets the "minimum creative expression" requirement for a work to be eligible for copyright. It is later in the same paragraph on the same page that those letters are mentioned as being "functional in the sense that they, along with the rest of the Toner Loading Program, also serve as input to the checksum operation and as a result amount to a lock-out code that the merger and scène à faire doctrines preclude from obtaining protection."

Because of this I have changed the text of the article to replace the "or if the Toner Loading Program on the chip did not contain the three-byte sequence "LXK" (Lexmark's stock symbol), the printer would not function." clause with one that states the truth that the entirety of the TLP is checksummed using a private algorithm.

[edit] Possible errors

  1. Under "District court ruling", 3rd paragraph, last sentence, should that read "Lexmark could not have known...", or "SCC could not have known..."? From context, the latter seems to be what was meant, but I'm not certain.
  2. Under "Concurring dissenting opinion", 2nd paragraph, 2nd sentence, should that read "... was a 'lock-out code'", or "... was not a 'lock-out code'"? Again, the latter seems to make more sense to me.
  3. Finally, (although this is not an error per se), I added a section heading "Request for rehearing". I'm not in love with the section name, but clearly a new section (or sub-section) needed to be started there. I wasn't certain which of those it should be, either. In some sense, it made sense to keep it with the 6th court discussion, but OTOH, since it also discussed the (lack of a) Supreme Court appeal request, I thought it might make more sense for it to be a higher-level section heading. Benhocking 14:18, 1 July 2007 (UTC)