Zipit Wireless, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation

The expansion of Zipit Wireless, Inc.’s litigation has abruptly reversed. Earlier in 2020, the plaintiff had sued LG Electronics (LGE), a case that was stayed in mid-May to await the outcome of trials instituted by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) over petitions for inter partes review (IPR) of the two patents-in-suit. Undeterred, Zipit hit Alphabet (Google), Apple, BLU Products, HTC, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic, Sony, TCL (TTE Technology), and ZTE in multiple districts last month. However, in the last week of June, the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed, without prejudice, each of those new complaints. One of the prior defendants, Apple, has responded by filing a complaint of its own (3:20-cv-04448), in the Northern District of California this time, seeking declaratory judgments that it does not infringe either patent asserted in the dismissed complaint.

So far in June, Zipit Wireless, Inc. has widely expanded its litigation over two homegrown patents, suing Alphabet (Google), BLU Products, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), Nokia, Panasonic, Sony, and TCL (TTE Technology) (1:20-cv-00756) in a single District of Delaware complaint, HTC and ZTE (1:20-cv-02489) together in a Northern District of Georgia complaint, and Apple (1:20-cv-02488) and Microsoft (1:20-cv-02487) in separate, stand-alone complaints also filed in the Northern District of Georgia. Throughout this campaign, begun in October 2013 against BlackBerry, Zipit has targeted the provision of mobile devices capable of sending messages containing an “emoji/graphical symbol” over a Wi-Fi application.