Future Link Systems, LLC v. Qualcomm Inc. et al DC

Delaware District Judge Leonard Stark has held another “Section 101 Day”, an experimental practice unique to his district under which a judge hears multiple Alice motions from unrelated cases on a single day and issues oral rulings from the bench, one after another. This time around, Judge Stark rejected three patent eligibility challenges, including two against NPE patents and another against a patent asserted by an operating company. The consolidated ruling comes the same week that Judge Stark faced questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee for his nomination by President Joe Biden to fill a soon-to-be-open seat on the Federal Circuit.

Future Link Systems, LLC has added suits against Apple (6:21-cv-00263), Broadcom (6:21-cv-00264), and Qualcomm (6:21-cv-00265) to the case that it filed earlier this year, against AMD, all in the Western District of Texas. The IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) NPE asserts five patents across the three new complaints, one previously at issue, four new to the campaign, and all received from NXP years ago—not as part of Future Link’s recent, January 15, 2021 acquisition of roughly 20 more patents from the same source. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of certain processors, and in Apple’s case, devices incorporating them.