CG Technology Development, LLC et al v. DraftKings, Inc.

The troubled gaming campaign of Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary CG Technology Development, LLC (CG Tech) has sputtered back to life after a brief stay in several of its cases, imposed in May 2017 to await a ruling from the Southern District of New York as to whether the NPE would be required to assign one of the patents (RE39,818) to survive multiple Alice challenges in the campaign back to its named inventor. In January 2017, a New York jury awarded that named inventor, Russell D. Slifer, former chief patent counsel at Micron and recent Deputy Director of the USPTO, money damages for breach of contract and/or breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing related to the assignment of the ‘818 patent. District Judge Andrew L. Carter has now issued an order, refusing to impose specific performance (assignment of the ‘818 patent back to Slifer) on CG Tech’s parent company, CG Technology, L.P., the defendant in that case. District Judge Robert Clive Jones in the patent litigation case has lifted the stay, at the parties’ request, and promptly transferred four of the seven cases before him out of Nevada, in light of the US Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision on patent venue.

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.

A Nevada judge has dismissed the remaining causes of action in an infringement suit brought by Cantor Fitzgerald subsidiary CG Technology Development, LLC (CG Tech), which had previously asserted 12 online gaming patents against FanDuel (2:16-cv-00801). In an October 18 order, District Judge Robert Jones partially denied a Rule 12 motion to dismiss filed by FanDuel in July against the seven patents still at issue, declining to find one of the patents-in-suit (RE39,818) invalid under Alice. However, Judge Jones dismissed claims related to the ‘818 patent and six others (6,884,166; 8,641,511; 8,771,058; 8,814,664; 9,306,952; 9,355,518) with leave to amend due to pleading deficiencies. This decision follows the parties’ mid-September stipulation to drop the other five patents from the case (6,899,628; 7,029,394; 7,534,169; 8,342,924; 9,111,417) as a result of an August 29 ruling in a CG Tech suit against Big Fish Games (2:16-cv-00857), in which Judge Jones found that each patent is directed to unpatentable subject matter under Alice.