ChriMar’s PoE Campaign Sees Transfers to California from Texas

Affiliated NPEs ChriMar Systems, Inc. and ChriMar Holding Company, LLC (collectively, “ChriMar”) fired off well over 40 lawsuits in 2015, all in the Eastern District of Texas. Each complaint asserts three or four of the later-issued patents in a family of asserted ChriMar patents (7,457,250; 8,155,012; 8,902,760; 8,942,107; 9,019,838; 9,049,019) generally related to communicating information about remote electronic equipment on a network. ChriMar has targeted devices (e.g. IP phones or network access points) that practice Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) standards. Two of the Texas defendants—Juniper Networks and Ruckus Wireless—have won motions to transfer the cases against them to the Northern District of California, and similar motions filed by other Texas defendants (e.g. NETGEAR) are pending.