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An Update on Patent Litigation, the Patent Marketplace, and New Cases
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Monday, September 16, 2024
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Patent Litigation Feature
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The Federal Circuit has revived a long-running dispute between Contour IP Holding, LLC and GoPro over action cameras, overturning a ruling that the asserted patents were ineligible under Alice. While the Northern District of California determined in 2022 that the claimed system for generating video at multiple quality levels depended only on generic camera components and was abstract, the appellate court countered in a September 9 precedential opinion that the lower court had characterized the patents at an “impermissibly high level of generality”. In the process, the Federal Circuit rejected the district court’s interpretation of a prior decision from 2021 that divided the appellate court over the proper bounds of Alice as applied to a physical device.
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Patent Watch
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At the end of July, a chipmaker moved roughly 50 US patents to a Texas entity, the name of which suggests the general subject matter of the transacted assets. The divestiture is one of several from this source to NPEs over the last several years, the most prominent of which has resulted in a long-running litigation campaign producing eyepopping Western District of Texas verdicts, notable Federal Circuit activity, and a hotly disputed license defense.
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New Patent Litigation
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Korean plaintiff Wilus Institute of Standards & Technology, Inc. has launched what appears to be its first US litigation, suing ASUSTek (Askey Computer) (2:24-cv-00753), HP (2:24-cv-00752), and Samsung (2:24-cv-00746) in a trio of new Eastern District of Texas complaints. Six wireless communications patents are asserted, in overlapping subsets, with infringement allegations targeting a wide array of devices that are compliant with the WiFi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) standard. Wilus discloses Good Day to Invent, Inc. as its corporate parent.
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In a new Western District of Texas complaint, Neural AI, LLC has accused NVIDIA (7:24-cv-00221) of infringing three patents moved to the plaintiff from Neurala this past July. Targeted is the provision of “products that provide and implement GPU-acceleration hardware, software, platforms, and services”, including NVIDIA’s GPU accelerators (with its “Hopper”, “Ada Lovelace”, “Ampere”, “Turing”, “Volta”, “Pascal”, and “Maxwell” GPU architectures) and its “superchips”. Neural AI describes the asserted patents as generally related to “the accelerated execution of numerical simulations and neural networks such that the intermediate outputs of a given execution ‘step’ can be dynamically transferred from the GPU to the CPU, reviewed, and corrected within the same computational cycle before being fed as inputs to the next execution step”.
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The same day that the February 2024 case that Avant Location Technologies LLC filed against Samsung was dismissed with prejudice, after a noticed settlement, the plaintiff filed a new complaint against Apple (2:24-cv-00757), asserting the same seven patents. Per Avant, “the Accused Products are Apple products that implement Find My, which include, but are not limited to, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple Watch, Mac, AirPods, AirTag, Apple Pencil, and Apple Vision Pro”. Litigation remains active against the other two defendants in this campaign: Generac (ecobee), which has yet to respond to a July 2023 complaint; and Fibar Group, which filed an answer on August 28, 2024.
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Since August 2014, Collabo Innovations, Inc., a Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) subsidiary, has been litigating a portfolio of patents received in 2013 from Panasonic, doing so across three campaigns as a formal matter. In February of this year, the last active case, against AMD in the Western District of Texas, was dismissed with prejudice after the parties noticed a resolution. Now, Collabo has sued Qualcomm (6:24-cv-00472) over the same single patent, generally related to a conserving power in a microcontroller. The accused products include “Qualcomm processors such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Processor APQ8064 and other processors and platforms offered and sold by Qualcomm that support low power state with power collapse (and similar functionality)”.
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After multiple complaints filed earlier this year, both in the Eastern District of Texas and before the International Trade Commission (ITC), against Samsung, SiOnyx, LLC has now sued Apple (1:24-cv-12354) in the District of Massachusetts. SiOnyx asserts three patents generally related to a backside-illuminated image sensor with light-trapping pixels, all at issue in the litigation against Samsung. Apple is accused of infringement through the provision of devices, including the iPhone 15 smartphone, that incorporate certain Sony image sensors.
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Touchstream Technologies, Inc. (d/b/a Shodogg) has filed its first complaint in 2024 with a suit against Yamaha (2:24-cv-00739) in the Eastern District of Texas. The three asserted patents, each of which are asserted in litigation for the first time, are broadly directed to triggering the remote playback of content. Yamaha is accused of infringement through the provision of products incorporating its MusicCast streaming and multi-room audio system, along with the MusicCast Controller application. At issue is MusicCast functionality that allegedly “provides playback of content including from Internet-based streaming music services on individual devices as well as multi-room configurations”.
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TS-Optics Corporation has filed a Central District of California complaint against Microsoft (8:24-cv-01974), targeting the provision of XBOX-series consoles that include certain disk drives, as well as the XBOX Cloud Gaming service, which supports the XBOX Touch Controls feature. The plaintiff received the two patents-in-suit, one generally related to an optical disk drive including a certain “optical pickup actuator” and the other, to virtual remote controls, from Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd.
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VDPP LLC has filed an Eastern District of Texas complaint against Canon (AXIS Communications) (2:24-cv-00727), targeting the provision of the Axis P1375 Network Camera for its alleged support for electronic image stabilization. Apparently expired, the asserted patent generally relates to generating and/or displaying a modified video. Southern District of Texas Judge Lee H. Rosenthal recently ruled a VDPP case against Volkswagen exceptional, holding the plaintiff and its counsel, Ramey LLP, jointly and severally liable for more than $207K in shifted attorney fees. As has become its recent practice, VDPP pleads extensively that its prior licensees are not required to mark any product as practicing this or any other patent asserted in this campaign.
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IoT Innovations LLC, an Empire IP LLC plaintiff, has sued Generac (ecobee) (2:24-cv-00729) and Resideo Technologies (Snap One) (2:24-cv-00704), both in the Eastern District of Texas. ecobee is already a defendant in this campaign, now targeted with 17 patents over the provision of its “home security and control platform and systems”, including ecobee’s smart home platform, smart thermostats, smart cameras, smart plugs and sensors, and related products and services. The Snap One complaint, the first to hit this defendant, aims seven of those patents at the provision of its various smart home and security products as provided under the brand name Control4 Smart Home.
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