Deeplinks
The public has a right to know what happens when companies litigate in publicly funded courts. Unfortunately, when it comes to patent cases, companies routinely ignore the public’s rights—for example, by filing entire documents under seal without making any attempt to justify that much secrecy. Even when courts have specific rules requiring justification for sealing requests and publicly filing redacted versions of sealed documents, parties can often defy them without consequence.
That’s why EFF, along with the Public Interest Patent Law Institute, and the assistance of Columbia Law School’s Science, Health, and Information Clinic has filed a motion to intervene and unseal documents in a patent case, Uniloc v. Google, in the Eastern District of Texas. When Google filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the parties filed their briefs and documentary exhibits entirely under seal, keeping even basic facts about those documents (like their length) secret. Worse, the parties did not file any sealing motions or make any other attempt to justify their excessive sealing requests. This conduct violated the public’s access rights under the Constitution and common law as well as the standing order of the presiding judge, Judge Rodney Gilstrap. It also undermines earlier efforts by EFF to ensure greater transparency in patent cases in this Texas federal court, which has one of the largest dockets of patent cases in the country.
These sealed documents are important: they go to whether Uniloc has a legal right, known as standing, to bring lawsuits based on these patents. As one of the country’s most prolific patent litigants, Uniloc’s right to sue affects the freedom of countless technology makers and users.
Many of the documents that Uniloc filed under seal in Texas were already unsealed in another case—yet in Texas, they remain sealed in their entirety. There is no justification for that. Once information is public, it cannot be sealed. Hoping the parties woul
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