June 5, 2012 – On May 30th, Judge Caroline Craven of the Eastern District of Texas granted the defendants’ motions to stay plaintiff Traffic Information‘s [NPE] six patent infringement actions pending ex parte reexamination until November 1, 2012 at such time a party may move the Court to continue the stay.  Traffic filed the litigations, alleging infringement of two patents (6,785,506 and 6,466,862) related to systems for providing traffic information to mobile devices.  In a related case, Google filed for a declaratory judgment action, seeking a judgment of noninfringement against Traffic on August 17, 2009.  Google accompanied this action with PTO ex parte reexamination requests of both patents, which were granted on May 24, 2010.  On July 5, 2011, Traffic cancelled 21 of the 23 claims of the ’606 patent and later amended its complaints, dropping the ’606 from ongoing litigations.  During a first reexamination of the ’862 patent, claims 1-5, 7-9, and 14-20 were cancelled while claims 6, 10-13, and 21-34 were confirmed patentable as unamended.  Following this, Google filed a second ex parte reexamination request against the ’862 patent that resulted in the patent examiner rejecting all remaining claims of the ’862 patent.  Traffic responded by cancelling one claim and filing a Notice of Appeal to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) relating to the other claims.  The defendant’s in these cases filed this action sighting the “advanced stage” of the litigation involving Google and the current state of the ’862 patent with claims standing rejected.  The judge granted the request and noted the defendants’ request by stating that the six month stay “alleviates [Traffic's] concerns” relating to the loss “of critical evidence” and “an increase in the difficulty in obtaining key infringement evidence.”  The Court, noting that the BPAI affirms, at least in part, 71% of all rejections, “[Traffic] does not possess any patent rights to assert against Defendants, and [its] only hope is a successful appeal to the BPAI and the Federal Circuit.  Defendants will suffer needless prejudice if they are forced to litigate these cases now, including time-consuming and costly discovery.”  Traffic has filed 15 litigations and been subject to three declaratory judgment actions relating to the ’606 and ’862 patents between 2007 and 2011. (Traffic Information, LLC v. Huawei Technologies, et. al. 2:10CV145, 2:10CV520, 2:11CV343, 2:11CV406, 2:11CV412, 2:11CV420)