Kewazinga Corp. v. Microsoft Corporation
- Gregory Woods
- 1:18-cv-04500
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 17
In Kewazinga Corp. v. Microsoft Corporation, Judge Woods granted the sealing motions in part and denied them in part, requiring narrower redactions.
Kewazinga Corp., Microsoft Corporation, certain Microsoft employees, third parties whose information appeared in the filings, and members of the public seeking access to the court documents.
What happened
Kewazinga Corp. v. Microsoft Corporation is a patent case in which both sides asked to redact or seal information filed with motions for summary judgment and motions about expert testimony. The requests covered business, technical, employee, financial, and third-party information.
The court ruled that most confidential business and technical information, and Microsoft employees’ email addresses, could be redacted or sealed. But it denied requests covering publicly available, insufficiently justified, or overbroad redactions, and denied without prejudice requests involving two incomplete documents and confidential third-party information.
Judge Gregory H. Woods granted the parties’ sealing motions in part and denied them in part. He required revised proposed redactions for third-party information and ordered documents whose sealing requests were denied to be filed publicly by April 7, 2021.
The detailed version
- Kewazinga Corp. v. Microsoft Corporation · No. 1:18-cv-04500
- Gregory Woods
- Mar. 31, 2021
Background
Kewazinga Corp. sued Microsoft Corporation in a patent-infringement case involving three patents about telepresence systems, devices, and methods for navigating imagery through a remote environment. The parties had filed competing motions for summary judgment and motions to exclude expert testimony. They also submitted eleven motions asking the court to redact or seal portions of briefs, statements of fact, declarations, and exhibits connected with those motions.
The requested redactions concerned Microsoft’s confidential business and technical information, Microsoft employees’ email addresses, confidential financial information, and information that Kewazinga or Microsoft said belonged to third parties and was protected by the case’s protective order.
Legal Standard
The court explained that judicial documents—materials filed with the court that are relevant to its work—are generally presumed to be available to the public. That presumption is especially strong for documents submitted with summary-judgment motions. A party seeking to seal material must show that sealing is necessary to protect a higher-value interest and that the proposed redactions are narrowly tailored.
The court applied a three-step approach: determine whether the material is a judicial document, assess the weight of the public-access presumption, and balance that presumption against interests favoring secrecy, such as privacy and protection of trade secrets or confidential business information.
Rulings
The court found that the documents were judicial documents. It treated the public-access presumption as strong for materials supporting summary judgment and somewhat lower for materials submitted with motions about evidence at trial. It also noted that a protective-order designation alone does not justify sealing a document filed with the court.
The court granted Microsoft’s request to redact its employees’ email addresses because those addresses were not relevant to the dispute and the employees had significant privacy interests.
The court concluded that most of Microsoft’s proposed redactions for confidential business information were justified. These materials included information about Microsoft’s business models, revenue sources and amounts, sales, user bases, product-feature usage, specific offerings, and confidential settlement agreements. The court found that disclosure could harm Microsoft or benefit competitors and that most of the redactions were narrowly tailored.
The court nevertheless identified business-information redactions it considered potentially overbroad or insufficiently supported, including redactions in Docket Nos. 202-6, 202-7 at paragraph 28, 202-15 at page 5 and paragraph 58, 212 at pages 19–24 and 32, 218 at pages 9–10, and 218-3 at page 224. It also rejected certain technical-information redactions where the information was publicly available, had already been left unredacted elsewhere, or was not shown to cause harm if disclosed. The court specifically denied requests concerning information needed to analyze an expert’s apportionment method and the parties’ “array of cameras” arguments.
The court denied without prejudice the requests concerning two documents it could not evaluate because one appeared to be missing pages and another contained a redaction for which the underlying text had not been provided.
The court also denied without prejudice the parties’ requests based on confidential third-party information. It found that the parties had provided too little support and that many proposed redactions were not narrowly tailored. The court directed the parties to submit revised proposed redactions that protect only legitimate third-party privacy interests. The court noted that the parties’ requests involved agreements concerning issues such as Kewazinga’s standing and the timing of its claimed subject matter, but this order did not decide those underlying patent issues.
Disposition
Judge Gregory H. Woods concluded that the parties’ motions to redact and seal were granted in part and denied in part. The parties had to submit revised jointly proposed redactions for documents involving third-party confidentiality interests, and file on the public docket documents for which sealing had been denied, by April 7, 2021. The clerk was directed to terminate the listed sealing motions.
Read the full 17-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.