BLOOMBERG NEWS
The U.S. Supreme Court turned away an appeal from a California smoker who blamed rising cigarette prices on the $206 billion settlement reached a decade ago between 46 states and the nation’s largest tobacco companies.
The justices, without comment, yesterday refused to revive Steve Sanders’ antitrust lawsuit against California Attorney General Jerry Brown and tobacco companies, including Altria Group Inc.’s Philip Morris USA unit and Reynolds American Inc.’s R.J. Reynolds Tobacco unit. A federal appeals court in San Francisco threw out the lawsuit in September.
Mr. Sanders’ attorneys argued unsuccessfully that the 1998 settlement led to lockstep price increases of $12.20 per carton between 1998 and 2002 alone.
The accord “effectively established a horizontal cartel that eliminated all incentive to increase market share or to compete on price,” Mr. Sanders argued in his appeal.
“Every court that has examined the merits of the claim at issue here has reached the same conclusion: The facts as proved tell a quite different story from the allegations of anti-competitive conduct in the plaintiff’s complaint,” the companies countered.
In other cases yesterday:
• The high court let stand a $4.3 million award against Toyota Motor Corp. for using another company’s patented technology in gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, including the top-selling Prius.
The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal by Toyota, leaving intact a jury verdict favoring closely held Paice LLC of McLean.
Toyota, the world’s second-largest automaker, also may have to pay Paice royalties for future vehicles it produces using the disputed technology.
The technology involves a microprocessor that accepts torque information from both the internal-combustion engine and electric motor.
In its Supreme Court appeal, Toyota called Paice a “patent litigation company” that was “attempting to impose a royalty toll on the Prius and similar Toyota hybrid vehicles based on an obscure patent.”
• A division of District-based Danaher Corp. lost a Supreme Court appeal in a dispute over patents for designing and making dental braces with a computer.
The court, without comment, let stand a federal appeals court decision that Align Technology Inc., the maker of Invisalign braces, didn’t infringe three of four patents owned by Danaher unit Ormco Corp. for a computer-aided system.
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