Motion Offense, LLC v. Sprouts Farmers Market, Inc. et al DC CAFC

In June, the USPTO issued another patent in a family that Motion Offense, LLC and related entities have been asserting in litigation. Roughly one month later, the plaintiff has sued Dropbox (6:21-cv-00758) in an original complaint and Alphabet (Google) in an amended complaint, over that new patent, both complaints filed in the Western District of Texas. File sharing features within the Dropbox platform—including Dropbox Plus, Dropbox Professional, Dropbox Business Standard, and Dropbox Business Advanced—are the accused products in the new case, which joins litigation between Motion Offense and Dropbox already underway in West Texas.

Motion Offense, LLC has filed suit in the Western District of Texas against Alphabet (Google) (6:21-cv-00514) over the provision of the Google Drive platform; the Google Chrome browser, Chrome OS, and Android OS; and the Google Cloud platform. Broadly directed to either data sharing or web browsing on an electronic device, the five asserted patents, while new to litigation themselves, belong to a large—and growing—family of patents familiar to litigation.

Gummarus, LLC has filed a second Eastern District of Texas case against Samsung (4:20-cv-00310), alleging infringement of the same six patents at issue in last April’s suit, as well as of a seventh. All of the patents generally relate to a search system that operates within an instant messaging application; a new accused product is identified in this second suit: the Samsung Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging system, with allegations targeting networking applications (e.g., Messaging as a Platform (MaaP) and/or chatbot, etc.) that can be configured on the messaging app. Gummarus recently changed counsel in its first suit, requesting and receiving a 30-day stay to make the switch—a stay that the court was told “may be useful to allow the [p]arties to work through issues in the infringement contentions” in that first case.

In mid-July, Motion Offense, LLC filed a Western District of Texas case accusing Sprouts Farmers Market (6:19-cv-00417) of infringing two data sharing patents through the use of Dropbox Business “for, among other things, sharing and storing data”. Roughly one month later, Dropbox has responded by filing a complaint against Motion Offense in the District of Delaware (1:19-cv-01521) seeking declaratory judgments of noninfringement of the same two patents asserted in Texas. Patents naming the same inventor, Robert Paul Morris, have popped up in litigation by multiple NPEs over the past few years.

Late last month, District Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas granted a sealed motion, brought by defendants Dell and Samsung, to compel NPE-plaintiff Cypress Lake Software, Inc. to produce a set of communications that it had logged as attorney-client privileged and/or protected as attorney work product prepared in anticipation of litigation. Cypress had sought to prevent production of its communications with Robert Paul Morris, the inventor named on the patents that the NPE has been asserting in litigation since 2015; Sitting Man, LLC, a Delaware entity under Morris’s control; and Mirai Ventures, LLC, a Texas entity that, according to the court’s order, entered into an October 30, 2015 “Financial Backer(s) Agreement . . . whereby Mirai agreed to provide funding and patent-prosecution services to Sitting Man in exchange for a portion of any proceeds from the enforcement, sale, or licensing of the patents”. Judge Kernodle’s order comes as the Texas court has been pelted with filings over multiple issues, as a separate portion of the campaign—against HP and ZTE—may also be ramping up in the Northern District of California after a transfer there, and as Cypress has filed a fourth case against Samsung (6:19-cv-00328) in the Eastern District of Texas, this time targeting the Korean parent entity itself.