SimpleAir, Inc. v. Google Inc. et al DC

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.

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.

Google has been sued by SimpleAir, Inc. for a second time (2:14-cv-00011). The current case asserts two patents related to data transmission to a remote computer device (8,572,279; 8,601,154). The ‘279 patent was asserted in SimpleAir’s first case against Google, filed in August 2013, but the ‘154 patent has not been asserted in any prior SimpleAir case.