TQ Delta LLC v Verizon Services Corp.. DC

TQ Delta LLC, a Techquity Capital Management, LLC subsidiary, has sued CommScope (ARRIS) (2:21-cv-00310) and Nokia (2:21-cv-00309) over the provision of DSL (digital subscriber line) equipment that complies with various DSL standards, including ADSL2/2+, VDSL2, G.bond, G.inp, G.vector, and G.fast. These Eastern District of Texas cases fall into a campaign that has been litigated before District of Delaware Judge Richard G. Andrews in two batches—one concerning DSL equipment and the other concerning Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) technology, a technology that enables media distribution over existing in-home coaxial cabling—since late 2013. More than 50 patents have been asserted, which Judge Andrews has divided up into multiple families for staged trials, two of which have resulted in jury verdicts favorable to TQ Delta, and which the PTAB has considered through nearly 30 petitions for inter partes review (IPR) filed.

The Federal Circuit has just affirmed most of a Delaware noninfringement ruling for HTC, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, and ZTE (2020-1337). On January 26, the appellate court agreed with Senior District Judge Joseph F. Bataillon that NPE Evolved Wireless LLC could not raise infringement claims against the companies’ accused smartphones due to a license between the asserted patents’ prior owner and Qualcomm, which provided the LTE chipsets used in those devices. As a result, Federal Circuit ruled that the NPE’s claims against the defendants, as Qualcomm’s customers, were barred under patent exhaustion. However, the court remanded as to the impact of the license’s alleged termination in late 2018—opting not to determine whether such a termination actually occurred, nor its effect on the license or infringement in the subsequent period.

This past week, Senior District Judge Joseph F. Bataillon signed a sealed order closing cases that Evolved Wireless LLC brought in June 2015 against HTC, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), Microsoft, Samsung, and ZTE. The order follows a proposed stipulation by the parties to stay those suits to await the outcome of the plaintiff’s appeal (19-2362) from a judgment, entered in the sixth June 2015 case in the campaign after a Delaware jury found this past April that Apple does not infringe either patent-in-suit. Last week also saw Evolved Wireless file its opening appellate brief, which argues that the district court erred by refusing to order a new trial based on several arguments, including because the trial court kept from the jury evidence allegedly “inconsistent with Apple’s arguments at trial that [the patent subject to the appeal] is not essential to the LTE standard”.

In October 2017, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against a variety of frequent litigants, including publicly traded NPEs Acacia Research Corporation and Xperi Corporation, as well as privately held Monument Patent Holdings, LLC and Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited. The Board also instituted trial in October for IPRs against multiple Acacia subsidiaries, Uniloc, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg. In addition, the PTAB issued an IPR final decision cancelling multiple claims from a data compression patent held by prolific plaintiff Realtime Data LLC, including the single claim that Riverbed Technology (one of the petitioners for the IPR) was found to infringe in a $4.3M verdict in May, with other final decisions issued in campaigns waged by TQ Delta LLC and publicly traded Quarterhill Inc. IPRs against IP Bridge, Inc. and Mobile Telecommunications Technologies, LLC also ended in termination in October after the patent owners requested adverse judgments.

TQ Delta, LLC filed suit against six communications providers, Comcast (1:15-cv-00611), Cox (1:15-cv-00612), DirecTV (1:15-cv-006113), DISH Network (1:15-cv-00614), Time Warner Cable (1:15-cv-00615), and Verizon (1:15-cv-00616), asserting a group of seven patents. The patents-in-suit relate to various aspects of DSL technology, including sub-carrier phase scrambling, transmitting, and receiving sub-channel information, and multi-carrier modulation (6,961,369; 7,835,430; 8,238,412; 8,432,956, 8,611,404; 8,718,158; 9,014,243). All but two of the patents (the ‘158 and ‘243 patents) have been involved in TQ Delta’s previous litigation. Defendants’ digital cable, media streaming, and DVR services, as well as products, such as set-top boxes, that make those services possible, are all accused of infringing the patents-in-suit.