In May of 2019, Plastipak sued Ice River Springs Water Co., accusing the Canadian company and its U.S. affiliate Ice River Springs USA of willfully infringing ten Plastipak patents related to “light-weighting,” a technique that allows for a neck of a plastic bottle that is lighter in weight and contains less material while retaining threads, tamper-evident formations and a support flange. Plastipak had previously sued Niagara Bottling, LLC in the Eastern District of Virginia, which the parties settled in 2018. In the present litigation, Ice River sought production related to the prior litigation from Plastipak, including prior art, deposition transcripts, discovery requests and responses and the like. Judge Talwani granted Niagara Bottling’s motion for a protective order, preventing the disclosure of documents containing Niagara’s confidential information that were involved in the Niagara litigation. She found that Ice River failed to show why such confidential information is sufficiently relevant to justify the burden on Niagara of having its confidential information exposed to a competitor. Judge Talwani denied Plastipak’s motion with respect to Plastipak’s own documents from the prior litigation, with any Niagara confidential information redacted, and further ordered Plastipak to confirm the redactions with Niagara prior to producing them.
