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An Update on Patent Litigation, the Patent Marketplace, and New Cases
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Monday, November 11, 2024
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Patent Litigation Feature
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An Eastern District of Texas jury has returned a noninfringement verdict for Nokia in litigation brought by Correct Transmission LLC. On November 5, the jury found that certain Nokia networking devices did not infringe three wireless communications patents from a now-defunct operating company. The verdict is the second this year in which a jury has found in Nokia’s favor over patents from that same source—a lawsuit from another plaintiff that, along with the case just tried, became involved in an overlapping dispute over foreign discovery earlier in 2024.
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Patent Watch
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Earlier this year, RPX noted the transfer of eight US patents from DCX US Agility Platform LLC, a subsidiary of DXC Technology, to VideoLabs, Inc., which is in active litigation over earlier-collected patents, from multiple operating companies. Last month, portfolios of additional patents moving to VideoLabs appeared in publicly available USPTO records, from three new sources: OLogN Technologies AG (in May 2024), PRJ Holding Company LLC (in July), and ZING Communications Inc. (in July as well). Meanwhile, VideoLabs and its subsidiary VL Collective IP, LLC have sued Hisense, together with myriad subsidiaries (2:24-cv-00904), over the provision of streaming products (e.g., dongles, projectors, set-top boxes, and TVs) that support the H.264 compression standard and/or are compatible with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), including certain Roku-series software products.
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New Patent Litigation
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In a new Eastern District of Texas complaint, coplaintiffs Malikie Innovations Limited (as “the successor-in-interest to a substantial patent portfolio created and procured over many years by [BlackBerry]”) and Key Patent Innovations Limited (KPI, as “the beneficiary of a trust pursuant to which Malikie owns, holds, and asserts the Asserted Patents”) have accused Sophos (2:24-cv-00905) of infringing seven of those former BlackBerry patents. Five of them are new to this campaign, which has now seen complaints filed against Acer, ASUSTek, D-Link, Nintendo, and Sophos, in that order, since March of this year. All cases remain “active”, although a stay has been imposed to facilitate a resolution in the D-Link case, and ASUSTek, the Taiwanese parent company, has mounted a novel challenge to venue in the Eastern District of Texas.
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Three Adeia Inc. subsidiaries—Adeia Guides Incorporated; Adeia Media Holdings LLC; and Adeia Technologies Incorporated—have together sued Disney (BAMTech, ESPN, Hulu) (1:24-cv-01231) over the provision of its various streaming services (i.e., Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, and Hulu Live) and related server products. At issue are features such as “chunking”, content delivery networks (CDNs), viewing progress tracking, and more, with six patents asserted in the District of Delaware complaint.
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CLOUD SYSTEMS HOLDCO IP LLC (CSHIP) has filed suit against Savant Systems (1:24-cv-08502) in the Southern District of New York. The patent-in-suit generally relates to controlling an “environment” through a server and a control client, just one from five asserted across the roughly 20 complaints that have been filed in this campaign since its October 2022 start. The accused products are certain media/music servers (“the PAV-SIPA devices (SIPA1SM, SIPA50SM, SIPA125SM)”) together with apps used to control them. The new complaint drops a couple of weeks after the USPTO canceled, via ex parte reexam (EPR), all 20 claims of one of the asserted patent’s family members.
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ERR Content IP LLC has filed suit in the Southern District of Texas against Comcast (4:24-cv-04385) over the provision of XFINITY Home. Asserted is the same patent—broadly directed to “providing a main content” on a first device and “extra content” synchronized to the main content on a second device—already in suit via August 2024 cases against Amazon, in the Western District of Texas, and against LG Electronics (LGE), in the Northern District of Texas. Per the claim chart attached to the ERR Content IP complaint, the identified first device here is a smartphone; the second device, a TV.
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Ford (2:24-cv-12904) and Subaru (2:24-cv-00909) are the latest defendants to be added to the sole litigation campaign of VDPP LLC, which has seen over 70 defendants sued since its launch in August 2019. The three patents-in-suit, asserted in overlapping sets, are broadly directed to generating and/or displaying a modified video. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of their respective backup camera systems. Meanwhile, prior defendant TP-Link has filed a declaratory judgment (DJ) action (8:24-cv-02456) against VDPP, seeking a judgment of noninfringement as to one of those three asserted patents. Despite a recent judgment holding VDPP and its counsel, Ramey LLP, jointly and severally liable for more than $207K in shifted attorney fees, VDPP has once again selected Ramey LLP to represent it in its new affirmative infringement complaints.
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Intel (MobilEye, MobilEye Vision Technologies) (0:24-cv-04149) has filed a declaratory judgment action against Facet Technology Corp. in the District of Minnesota. It concerns the same two patents that Facet asserted against MobilEye Global in an Eastern District of Texas case filed this past January. There, in early September, District Judge Robert W. Schroeder III allowed Facet Technology 60 days of venue-related discovery, with leave to amend thereafter, given the defendant’s successful motion to dismiss the original complaint “as lacking a plausible venue allegation”. Elsewhere, Facet Technology’s standing to sue has been challenged.
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Last week, Genghiscomm Holdings, LLC filed a second complaint against Samsung (2:24-cv-00901) in the Eastern District of Texas. Asserted is a single patent from the same family to which the eight patents already in suit belong, this one broadly directed to discrete Fourier transform-spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-spread OFDM) used in LTE uplink. Samsung has answered the complaint in the prior suit, in which the court has set a schedule and moved the matter into discovery.
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In a new Southern District of Florida complaint, T5.2 Ltd. has accused Cloud Software Group (Citrix Systems) (0:24-cv-62093) of infringing eight patents through the provision of various “Hypervisor, virtual application and virtual desktop infrastructure products” that allegedly offer certain “compression assistance, processing, and/or GPU-sharing functionality”. The inventor-controlled plaintiff pleads that T5 Labs, a British entity also run by Graham Clemie, owns the asserted patents and that it is “the exclusive licensee with all right, title, and interest in and to” them. T5.2 is the third plaintiff to sue as an exclusive licensee of patents held by T5 Labs.
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Inventor-controlled Content Aware, LLC has filed its first litigation, suing Algolia (2:24-cv-00895), Home Depot (2:24-cv-00896), and Nosto Solutions (2:24-cv-00894), all in the Eastern District of Texas. The sole asserted patent generally relates to a “content recognition and data categorization system”. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of their respective e-commerce personalization and recommendation products: for Algolia, the Algolia Recommend API; for Home Depot, the Home Depot Personalization Engine (and related Google Cloud products); and for Nosto, the Nosto Commerce Experience platform.
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CardWare, Inc. has rebooted its sole litigation campaign, launched in May 2022 with a case against Samsung, with separate suits against Alphabet (Google) (7:24-cv-00278) and Apple (7:24-cv-00279) in the Western District of Texas. The six asserted patents, asserted in overlapping sets, generally relate to using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to conduct wireless transactions. Apple is accused of infringement through the provision of products (e.g., computers, headsets, laptops, payment cards, smart watches, smartphones, and tablets) that support Apple Pay and Apple Wallet; and Google, over smartphones and smart watches that support Google Pay and Google Wallet.
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In Case You Missed It
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In late October, District of Minnesota Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz recused himself from a case remanded by the Federal Circuit, indicating that the court did “not take this step lightly”. Per the recusal order, the court “does not know how it would proceed to construe ‘substantially rigid portion’ in a manner consistent with the Federal Circuit’s opinion and does not believe it can set aside its previous conclusions to make an impartial determination”. Judge Schiltz had ruled indefinite all claims in the asserted patents before him because this tricky term, “substantially rigid portion”, could not be properly construed—by plaintiff Teleflex, by defendant Medtronic, by former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu, or by the court itself. After bouncing off another judge, however, the case is set for a status conference on November 21 before District Judge Laura M. Provinzino, who just took the federal bench, in mid-September.
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Last year, the relationship between frequent plaintiff-side counsel Ramey LLP and monetization operation “AiPi” imploded, affecting a long list of litigation campaigns and producing ramifications that continue to ripple outward even now, over a year later. However, eclipsed by the wider events of late 2023 was an “Advisory to the Court”, filed to inform Western District of Texas Judge Jason K. Pulliam of an alleged white-box “cover-up”. Apparently, defendant’s counsel made that discovery after running a quick search for the term “skin” on a claim chart that a Ramey LLP-repped plaintiff attached to its complaint.
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