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British Airways and Korean Airlines agree to pay more than $300 million each in deal with Antitrust Division

Client Alert | 1 min read | 08.03.07

The Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice announced on August 1, 2007 that two major airlines will plead guilty to charges that they conspired with other major airlines to fix prices for passenger and cargo services. Each airline will pay more than $300 million in fines for conduct that affected U.S. passengers and shippers.

In the U.S., both British Airways and Korean Airlines were charged with conspiring with competitors to fix rates, including fuel and security surcharges, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act (15 U.S.C. §1).

Also on August 1, the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) announced that British Airways had agreed to pay roughly $275 million in fines to that agency. The timing of these announcements demonstrates close coordination between U.S. and foreign antitrust authorities.


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Client Alert | 2 min read | 11.14.25

Defining Claim Terms by Implication: Lexicography Lessons from Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corporation

Claim construction is a key stage of most patent litigations, where the court must decide the meaning of any disputed terms in the patent claims.  Generally, claim terms are given their plain and ordinary meaning except under two circumstances: (1) when the patentee acts as its own lexicographer and sets out a definition for the term; and (2) when the patentee disavows the full scope of the term either in the specification or during prosecution.  Thorner v. Sony Comput. Ent. Am. LLC, 669 F.3d 1362, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. highlights that patentees can act as their own lexicographers through consistent, interchangeable usage of terms across the specification, effectively defining terms by implication....