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An Update on Patent Litigation, the Patent Marketplace, and New Cases
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Monday, January 20, 2025
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RPX’s fourth-quarter review takes a look back at the top patent trends in Q4 and 2024 overall, including the latest on district court filings, the PTAB, the UPC, SEP licensing, and third-party funding. Read the full report today.
RPX members are also exclusively invited to join a live RPX Community webinar covering highlights from this report. Remaining live sessions are scheduled to accommodate time zones in Europe (January 21) and APAC (January 23); CLE credit may be available. Members can register on RPX Insight.
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Patent Litigation Feature
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The Unified Patent Court (UPC) began to issue its first decisions on the merits in July 2024. Since then, much of the focus has been on the court’s handling of injunctions, which are notable in part for their possible scope—as a single claim can result in an injunction spanning up to all 18 UPC member states. However, the UPC can also issue damage awards with that same reach, covering a market nearly the same size (by population) as the US. Now, the breadth of available damages could increase further due to a new ruling from the Court of Appeal. On January 16, the appellate body decided that not only does the UPC have the power to hear a damages-only claim based on a merits judgment from a national court, it may also award damages reaching back before the UPC’s start date—in this case, all the way back to 2016.
Read More >>
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Last Friday, an Eastern District of Texas jury returned a verdict that Headwater Research LLC failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Samsung infringed any of the four claims tried. Those claims are from a single patent, one of many asserted by Headwater against Samsung in multiple complaints filed since October 2022. Each of the US cases was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Headwater having also sued Samsung before the Unified Patent Court (UPC).
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Patent Watch
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Across the US, NPE litigation rose substantially last year. In the District of Delaware, though, NPE litigation continued to fall, sinking from 23% in 2021 to just 7% last year. Both of these propositions are well documented, in RPX’s recently published Q4 in Review, which also looks back at numbers and trends from all of 2024. In this RPX member exclusive, we take a closer look at the potential cause of, and controversy around, that marked drop in NPE filings in the District of Delaware.
Read More (RPX Members Only) >>
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On January 1, 2025, Ofinno, LLC assigned a portfolio of more than 200 US patents to an entity tied to Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC. The transfer follows recent portfolio pickups for the Texas monetization firm from Acorn Semi, LLC and Vulcan Gaming LLC. Currently available USPTO records indicate that Ofinno, a research and development outfit, holds hundreds more active US patents, with plenty of applications in the pipeline.
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New Patent Litigation
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BillSure LLC began its first litigation campaign with a January 8, 2025 complaint against Amazon. A week later, the New Mexico plaintiff has added separate cases against Amdocs (2:25-cv-00031), Sandvine (2:25-cv-00032), and Subex (2:25-cv-00035), also in the Eastern District of Texas, and against Broadcom (VMware) (7:25-cv-00016), in the Western District of Texas. Targeted with a single patent-in-suit is the provision of software products and solutions that support features for monitoring a user’s billing data and identifying spending anomalies.
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Little has happened on the docket of the Eastern District of Texas case that Light Guide Innovations LLC filed against TCL (TCT Mobile and multiple subsidiaries) last August, other than most recently an extension of the deadline to answer that complaint to April 10, 2025. Now, the plaintiff has filed a second complaint in the same district, this time hitting Hisense (2:25-cv-00051) over 16 patents from the same former Suzhou Lekin Semiconductor Co. Ltd. (d/b/a LEKIN) portfolio. The accused products are televisions and displays that include certain LED backlight units or LED strips.
Read More (RPX Members Only) >>
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CogniPower, LLC first sued Anker Innovations (Fantasia Trading d/b/a AnkerDirect) in December 2019 in a District of Delaware case in which Power Integrations successfully intervened. That case was reassigned to the docket of District Judge Jennifer L. Hall, after which several rulings have gone against the plaintiff. In particular, the court denied a CogniPower motion to amend its infringement contentions to include additional accused products in the case. The plaintiff has now hit Anker (1:25-cv-00066) again in the same district, this time adding certain PowerCore- and PowerPort-series products to the list of chargers already accused.
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Texas plaintiff Random Chat LLC has added a Western District of Texas case against Amazon (7:25-cv-00011) to the litigation campaign it began this past summer, over a single patent generally related to a method for setting up random multimedia connections between users who have logged into a server and are part of a pool of users. Targeted throughout has been the provision of customer support chat services. Prior defendants, including Abercrombie & Fitch and Aveda, challenged the claims of the asserted patent under Alice, as directed to the abstract idea of “permitting online chat sessions”.
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In an Eastern District of Texas complaint, Carma Technology Limited and Carma Technology Corporation have sued Uber (2:25-cv-00029) over the provision of ridesharing and delivery services, targeting features allegedly shared between the two that relate to driver matching, soliciting ratings, pickups along a route, and ride safety monitoring. The new pleading emphasizes the background of the sole named inventor for the asserted patents, Sean O’Sullivan, characterized as “a well-known and successful technologist and entrepreneur”.
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Traxcell Technologies II LLC (Traxcell II) has sued Juniper Networks (1:25-cv-00360), in what appears to be the first infringement suit filed in this plaintiff’s own right, after being previously substituted as the plaintiff in litigation originally filed by Traxcell Technologies, LLC (Traxcell I). In the Southern District of New York complaint, Traxcell II targets the provision of certain wireless access points, including the AP63 Series, that support the Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance cloud platform. At issue are network management features such as generating location information for MU-MIMO-capable devices based on wireless signals, as well as related functionality including storing Wi-Fi performance metrics and/or captured packet data in the cloud and optimizing RF settings in real-time based on changing conditions (that last feature branded as “AI-Native Radio Resource Management”).
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Hyperquery LLC has filed another wave of complaints in its sole litigation campaign, begun in January 2023, this past week Hyperquery suing Asustor (2:25-cv-00036), Atlassian (2:25-cv-00037), ByteDance (Pico Immersive) (2:25-cv-00049), D2L (2:25-cv-00039), Fiserv (2:25-cv-00040), GOG (2:25-cv-00041), JetBrains (2:25-cv-00042), Nemetschek Group (2:25-cv-00043), Overwolf (2:25-cv-00044), PDD Holdings (2:25-cv-00047), Pipedrive (2:25-cv-00050), Sage Group (2:25-cv-00052) and Sony (Sony Corporation) (for a second time) (2:25-cv-00023), all in the Eastern District of Texas. The plaintiff asserts a single patent generally related to initiating a download of an application in response to a user’s search query and input. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of app stores/marketplaces (Asustor, Atlassian, ByteDance, Fiserv, GOG, JetBrains, Overwolf, Pipedrive, and Sony) or websites that allow users to download applications onto their smartphones (D2L, Nemetschek Group, and PDD Holdings).
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In Case You Missed It
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On January 13, 2025, Western District of Texas Judge Xavier Rodriguez shifted just over $60K in attorney fees in a case that CTD Networks LLC filed against Alphabet (Google) back in October 2022. In a separate order, Judge Rodriguez denied a Microsoft motion seeking a $100K sanction (under 28 U.S.C. § 1927 and Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11) against Ramey LLP for its representation of CTD. Per the court’s 1927 analysis, “Taking unreasonable positions is not necessarily vexatious behavior”, and the evidence that Ramey LLP disregarded its client’s instructions—a “certainly troubling” declaration from CTD’s (and AiPi’s) Eric Morehouse, balanced against arguably privileged emails that Ramey attached to his papers—could not overcome the applicable, clear-and-convincing burden of proof. Ramey LLP had sought its own sanctions, but Judge Rodriguez ruled that the firm, as former litigation counsel, lacks standing to pursue them.
Read More >>
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