Mesa Digital LLC v. Lenovo (United States) Inc. DC

Mesa Digital LLC has filed suit against T-Mobile (1:18-cv-01887) in the District of Delaware over two patents generally related to “multimedia” mobile devices. The complaint calls out T-Mobile’s Coolpad Defiant smartphone; original complaints filed in July against Huawei and ZTE, over the same two patents, make similar identifications (Huawei’s P10 and ZTE’s Axon Elite), but the NPE has since amended the ZTE complaint to swap in AT&T Primetime as the product actually accused of infringement in that case. The patents belong to a family of more than 30, other members of which are held, and have been concurrently asserted by, Mesa Digital affiliate Ortiz & Associates Consulting, LLC. In September, Alphabet (Google) (3:18-cv-05983) filed a Northern District of California complaint seeking declaratory judgments of noninfringement of two of those patents, after Ortiz & Associates voluntarily dismissed an earlier affirmative case in the Northern District of Illinois.

On the heels of three voluntary dismissals in cases brought in February of this year, Mesa Digital LLC has filed two new complaints, one each against Huawei (2:18-cv-00285) and ZTE (1:18-cv-04775). The suits assert the same two patents, generally related to “multimedia” mobile devices, seen in the recently dismissed complaints against Amazon (voluntarily dismissed without prejudice), BlackBerry (with prejudice), and Sony (without prejudice). At issue are smartphones, with Huawei’s P10 and ZTE’s Axon Elite called out in each complaint.

Named inventors from a large family of patents, generally related to “multimedia” mobile devices, have filed a second wave of cases, this time through plaintiff Mesa Digital LLC. The new complaints accuse Amazon (1:18-cv-00919), BlackBerry (1:18-cv-00921), Lenovo (1:18-cv-00922), and Sony (1:18-cv-00924) of infringement through the manufacture and sale of certain smartphones. Kermit D. Lopez and Luis M. Ortiz, patent lawyers and named partners at Ortiz & Lopez, PLLC (d/b/a OL PATENTS), asserted eight patents from the same family in a campaign brought by Front Row Technologies LLC, which ended after the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court decision invalidating those eight patents as directed to patent-ineligible subject matter under Alice.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) continued to see the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against publicly traded NPEs in March 2017, including Acacia Research Corporation; Finjan Holdings, Inc.; Pendrell Corporation; TiVo Corporation (formerly known as Rovi Corporation); and Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). A variety of prolific, privately held NPEs were also targeted for IPR throughout March, including Blackbird Tech LLC, General Patent Corporation, IP Edge LLC, Realtime Data LLC, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg, along with several inventors and inventor-controlled NPEs and an assortment of other plaintiffs.