by Dennis Crouch

Collision Communications filed its opening brief yesterday in Collision Communications, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., No. 2026-1893 (Fed. Cir.), appealing Judge Gilstrap's refusal to enjoin Samsung's ongoing infringement of U.S. Patent No. 7,593,492. Paul Clement signed as counsel of record, alongside trial counsel, including Austin Curry, who has shepherded the arguments.

The brief asks the court to vacate and remand with instructions to enter a permanent injunction, resting first on a narrow ground: a district court that has already found ongoing irreparable harm and rejected the defendant's hardship showing as unsupported cannot then hold that the patentee flunked the balance of hardships. But the brief also asks for more. It urges the Federal Circuit to hold that traditional equitable principles, as they stood in 1789, treat ongoing patent infringement as ordinarily constituting irreparable harm that money cannot remedy.

This is my third post on this dispute. The first covered Collision's originalist-equity motion and the DOJ-USPTO statement of interest; the second covered Judge Gilstrap's denial. See Dennis Crouch, "Intitled to Tie Him Up": Can 18th-Century Chancery Practice Restore Patent Injunctions?, Patently-O (Mar. 2, 2026); Dennis Crouch, Categorical Rules Cut Both Ways: Originalist Equity, NPE Status, and the Symmetry of eBay's Four-Factor Test, Patently-O (May 20, 2026).

The short version of the decision below: after a $445 million willful infringement verdict, Judge Gilstrap found that Collision had established irreparable harm and the inadequacy of legal remedies under eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., 547 U.S. 388 (2006), rejected the idea that a non-practicing patentee can never satisfy those factors, but then denied the injunction because Collision had not carried its burden on the balance of hardships and the public interest.

Read the appellant brief here: Collision Communications, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. - Entry BL-12