SimpleAir, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation et al CAFC

Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has filed suit against SimpleAir, Inc., seeking a declaratory judgment that its cloud messaging services do not infringe a single, newly issued patent (9,356,899) from a family that has been involved in each of the NPE’s previous four lawsuits against the company (2:16-cv-03758). Google’s lawsuit also asserts claim and issue preclusion and argues that the ‘899 patent is unenforceable due to inequitable conduct, alleging in part that SimpleAir withheld key portions of the campaign’s litigation history from the USPTO and failed to disclose information related to an inventorship dispute.

The Federal Circuit has overturned an $85M infringement verdict against Google, ruling that improper claim construction led to a Texas jury’s January 2014 finding that the tech company infringed a single cloud messaging patent (7,035,914) asserted against it by SimpleAir, Inc. (15-1251, 15-1253). In a precedential opinion issued on April 1, 2016, the court ruled that District Court Judge Rodney Gilstrap erred in his construction of two key claim terms, holding that “no reasonable jury could find infringement under the correct constructions” and remanding for entry of a judgment of non-infringement. The court also upheld the jury’s decision that the ‘914 patent was not invalid for indefiniteness. Texas-based SimpleAir, which characterizes itself as an inventor-owned technology licensing company, first began filing litigation in 2006 in what remains its only campaign to date. This victory is Google’s second against SimpleAir, following an October 2015 jury verdict of non-infringement in a different case (2:14-cv-00011) involving a related patent (8,572,279).

On October 12, 2015, a jury in the Eastern District of Texas returned a non-infringement verdict in favor of Google in the latest of a long string of cases filed by SimpleAir, Inc. The NPE filed the case (2:14-cv-00011) in January 2014, asserting two patents (8,572,279, 8,601,154) from a family of eight that it characterizes as its “data transmission” patents. The patents generally relate to the processing and transmission of notification data to a remote computing device, and the case focused on push notifications sent by certain Google services to Android devices. SimpleAir dropped the ’154 patent on the eve of trial; therefore, the jury only heard disputes related to the ‘279 patent, finding the asserted claims not infringed but also not invalid.

On Saturday, a jury in the Eastern District of Texas ruled that Google’s Android technology infringed a messaging and notification patent owned by SimpleAir, Inc.

SimpleAir, Inc. filed suit (2:11-cv-00416) against Ericsson, Google, HTC, Huawei, LGE, Microsoft, Motorola Mobility, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson over two patents related to content delivery for mobile devices. SimpleAir has filed four prior suits since 2006 against over 20 defendants, including Apple, Facebook, RIM, and Yahoo.  9/15, Eastern District of Texas.