Brian Ferrall

Ferrall successfully defended Comcast Cable Communications LLC against patent infringement claims brought by Two-Way Media Ltd. involving multicasting and real-time streaming technology.

U.S. District Judge Richard G. Andrews of the District of Delaware declared Two-Way Media's patents invalid following Ferrall's arguments.

Ferrall also argued the appeal at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which affirmed Comcast's victory in November after concluding that the Two-Way Media patents were directed to abstract ideas. Two-Way Media Ltd. v. Comcast Cable Communications LLC et al., 2016-2531 (Fed. Cir., filed Nov. 1, 2017).

He recently got the en banc petition for the case denied in March.

Ferrall also scored an influential win in a case against Cisco Systems Inc. over the issue of the extent to which textual commands that are used to control ethernet switches are copyrightable. Cisco accused his client, Arista Networks Inc., of infringing, and the jury ruled in favor of Arista on both copyright and patent claims. Cisco Systems Inc. v. Arista Networks Inc., 14-CV5344 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 5, 2014).

"Other ethernet companies used them and Cisco didn't say anything about it," he said. "We introduced evidence saying that Cisco actually liked that other competitors were using it. It made them the industry standard."

"Except then when Arista did it and actually started really threatening Cisco's dominance, Cisco turned around and sued and claimed copyright over these commands," Ferrall added.

He said that he used a scenes a faire defense, which he explained is a doctrine which says that stock effects of a certain genre, in literature or other art, are not protected by copyright. The attorney successfully extended this argument to the computer copyright context and the jury granted "a complete victory."

Ferrall said that his overall approach to law is influenced by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-Prize winning psychologist and economist who pioneered modern theories in behavioral psychology.

He said that reading Kahneman's work "really has changed the way I go about putting together a presentation and trying to understand the audience, trying to understand how human decision making has sort of inherent frailties in it ... and errors at times, and trying to anticipate those, and figure out how to be sure that you don't fall into traps of ... weaknesses or errors in decision making."

-- Caroline Hart