|
An Update on Patent Litigation, the Patent Marketplace, and New Cases
|
Monday, July 22, 2024
|
Patent Litigation Feature
|
|
In August 2020, the UK became the first country where courts have asserted the jurisdiction to set the terms of a global fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) license to a standard essential patent (SEP) portfolio. Yet while courts there have since found that implementers can seek such FRAND determinations proactively, rather than in response to an infringement claim, no UK court has yet allowed such a rate-setting claim against a patent pool. The UK High Court has now doubled down on this posture, ruling on July 15 that Tesla could not seek a FRAND determination for the entire 5G pool administered by defendant Avanci, LLC, neither through certain claims against Avanci itself or by treating pool licensor InterDigital, Inc. as a “representative” of the other Avanci SEP owners. However, Justice Timothy Fancourt, writing for the court, expressed “some concern” that the applicable law required this “odd” result.
Read More >>
|
|
District of Delaware Judge Richard G. Andrews has granted to Adobe renewed judgment of noninfringement as a matter of law, upsetting a jury verdict that awarded ViaTech Technologies, Inc. nearly $34M in damages. Claim 1 of the only tried patent contains an element—a “license monitor and control mechanism”—that the court construed as requiring means-plus-function treatment. In his Markman order, Judge Andrews pointed to various portions of the patent specification that identified structures for performing each of two recited functions, but at trial, per the court, ViaTech’s expert failed to point to the right passages, the passages corresponding to the first of those two recited functions, “communicating with a dynamic license database”. Lacking this supportive evidence, the infringement verdict, and the related damages award, must fall.
Read More >>
|
Patent Watch
|
|
Last week, the Federal Circuit denied an appeal filed by Backertop Licensing LLC and its sole owner and Texas paralegal Lori LaPray from an order in which Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly imposed a running civil contempt fine. Judge Connolly had ordered LaPray to appear before him in person to answer questions about the assets, control, and behavior of Backertop. She refused, and Judge Connolly fined her $200 per open day of court until she does. The appeals court has now backed Judge Connolly, ruling that his order requiring her to appear in person and his order imposing the civil contempt fine “were within the District Court’s inherent authority and were not abuses of discretion”. The fines began to run on August 23, 2023—roughly 334 calendar days ago.
Read More >>
|
New Patent Litigation
|
|
Hermes IP Management LLC has become the latest entity tied to Texas monetization firm Longhorn IP LLC to file US litigation. In a new Eastern District of Texas complaint, Hermes IP has accused Samsung (2:24-cv-00540) of infringing three former SK Telecom patents through the provision of mobile devices featuring audio noise cancellation, multiple home screens, and/or image geotagging and navigation features. Longhorn IP has made headlines recently for its appeal to the Federal Circuit of the requirement that it post a bond under Idaho’s “Bad-Faith Patent Assertion” law, in litigation against Micron.
Read More >>
|
|
VB Assets, LLC has filed a second complaint against Amazon (1:24-cv-00839), again in the District of Delaware, alleging infringement of five more natural language processing patents through the provision its various Alexa products (identified as including “Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show, FireTV, Alexa apps, and Alexa cloud” products). The case drops as District Judge Maryellen Noreika considers fully briefed posttrial motions following a November 2023 jury verdict in the first case filed by VB Assets. That jury awarded VB Assets $46.7M in damages, as a running royalty, for the infringement of four claims, one from each of four patents, an award that Amazon has asked the court to set aside and that VB Assets has asked be upped with a “modest enhancement” (by half) to $70.05M.
Read More >>
|
|
Sinotechnix LLC has filed what appears to be its first litigation, accusing Samsung (2:24-cv-00544) of infringing six patents from a portfolio received from Seoul Semiconductor back in May 2022. The patents are broadly directed to various aspects of lighting technologies—including “irradiation-redistribution lenses”, LED devices, LED fabrication, LED packages, and more—with infringement allegations in the new Eastern District of Texas complaint targeting Samsung over the provision of monitors and TVs that incorporate screen lighting technologies such as certain diffusion plates, lead frames, and lenses.
Read More >>
|
|
RPX recently noted the transfer of nine US patents from South Korean research institution Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) to KAIFI LLC, a Texas plaintiff that has previously litigated a single patent originating with Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) but received from Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. That assignment is now sandwiched between a July 2023 transfer from PowerVoice to KAIFI (three patents) and an April 2024 transfer from Intellectual Discovery (one patent). This past week, KAIFI sued Amazon (2:24-cv-00542) over its received assets, in a new Eastern District of Texas complaint that targets the provision of a wide array of products, including the Alexa voice assistant and related products.
Read More (RPX Members Only) >>
|
|
Freedom Patents LLC has added an Eastern District of Texas case against Lenovo (4:24-cv-00646) to the wave of suits filed last month in the same district, one against each of ASUSTek, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), HP Enterprise (HPE), Hon Hai Precision Industry (Sharp), LG Electronics (LGE), Micro-Star, Razer, Samsung, Sony, and Vantiva. The accused products in this campaign, targeted with the same three former Mitsibushi Electric (MELCO) patents, have been devices (e.g., gateways, MIMO modules, TVs, etc.) that implement MIMO Wi-Fi capabilities.
Read More >>
|
|
So far this summer, InnoMemory, LLC has added cases against G. Skill International (2:24-cv-00470), Winbond Electronics (2:24-cv-00497), and NEC (2:24-cv-00541), in that order and all in the Eastern District of Texas, to the litigation campaign it launched back in July 2021. Against each new defendant, the plaintiff asserts a single patent, generally related to “reducing power consumption during background operations in a memory array”, originally developed at Cypress Semiconductor but received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), with infringement allegations targeting the provision of a range of products that incorporate DDR4 memory technology.
Read More >>
|
|
So far in July, DigiMedia Tech, LLC—an entity associated with IP Investments Group LLC (d/b/a IPinvestments Group)—has expanded its litigation campaign over patents received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) with suits against Hyundai (Kia) (2:24-cv-00510) and Mercedes Benz (2:24-cv-00531) in the Eastern District of Texas. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of automobiles that incorporate surround-view camera systems and virtual assistants.
Read More >>
|
|
Yangtze Memory Technologies has filed a second Northern District of California case against Micron Technology (Micron Consumer Products Group) (3:24-cv-04223), adding eleven patents to the eight asserted in last November’s complaint. Micron pleaded counterclaims in that suit asserting five Micron patents, but last week the court granted Yangtze Memory’s motion to dismiss them based on failure to sufficiently allege infringing US activity and/or compliance with marking requirements. Meanwhile, the parties have submitted a joint proposed protective order in the earlier case, after Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson provided guidance on the parties’ previous disputes, ordering Yangtze to make its source code available in the US, not just in China, and characterizing portions of the request that information be withheld from Yangtze Memory’s parent company because it is on the Entity List for Export Administration Regulations as “probably the most grossly overreaching discovery argument that the undersigned judge has ever seen”.
Read More >>
|
In Case You Missed It
|
|
Southern District of Texas Judge Lee H. Rosenthal has ruled that a case filed last August by VDPP LLC is exceptional, justifying a shift of attorney fees incurred by defendant Volkswagen in defending it. VDPP and its counsel Ramey LLP have been held jointly and severally liable for those shifted fees as both engaged in “repeated misconduct” that “underscores the need for meaningful deterrence”. Central to the outlined misconduct is VDPP’s request for relief, which sought “future damages and a permanent injunction on a patent that had expired a year before” and “past damages despite an inability to allege patent marking”. In the weeks before this July 11 order came down, VDPP filed new complaints in various districts, one against each of Advanced Technology Video, CostarHD, Digital Projection, Kaltec Electronics, Sceptre, Skyworth, and Snap One Holdings (SunBriteTV).
Read More >>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
