California and Texas Courts Produce Near-Simultaneous Conflicting Results in Targeted Advertising Campaign

This month, the two cases filed by Anonymous Media Research Holdings LLC in separate Texas federal courts on the same day in September 2023 have led to starkly different results. In the Eastern District of Texas case against Samsung, the court denied a motion to stay in light of certain inter partes review proceedings (IPR), issued a claim construction order, granted summary judgment of no invalidity under Alice, and presided over a jury trial that just produced a $78.5M verdict for Anonymous Media. The concurrent suit against Roku was transferred for convenience from the Western District of Texas to the Northern District of California, where the case was stayed in light of that IPR activity, after which District Judge Vince Chhabria, 11 days after the conflicting summary judgment ruling in Texas, invalidated Anonymous Media’s asserted patents in light of Alice.

The Eastern District of Texas jury found claims 1, 5, 9, and 13 of the 10,719,848 patent and claim 1 of the 10,963,911 patent infringed and not proven invalid. It found $78,512,999 to be the “sum of money, if paid now in cash” that “would compensate Anonymous Media for Samsung’s infringement”, with 52 percent of the sum attributed to infringement of the ’848 patent; 48 percent, to that of the ’911 patent. The patents belong to a nine-member family with issue dates ranging from October 2012 to July 2024, with an earliest estimated priority date in May 2004 based on a provisional application (through a divisional). The patents name Christopher (“Chris”) Otto and Jonathan S. Steuer as inventors.

Anonymous Media originally asserted the same six patents (the 8,296,791; 8,510,768; 8,756,622; 10,572,896; ‘848; and 10,719,849 patents) against each defendant. In the East Texas case, it added through amended pleadings allegations concerning two more patents (8,677,389; 10,963,911); in the Northern California case, it added just one (12,040,883), all from the same family. The patents generally relate to “automatic content recognition” (ACR), which the plaintiff characterizes as technology for monitoring a user’s activity to better target and personalize delivered advertisements. The defendants have been accused of infringement through the provision of “software systems, hardware systems, network architecture, products, and services” that enable their respective “ACR-based” offerings.

The parties agreed to organize the patents according to whether the content being automatically recognized is audio or video content and to the particular method employed. For the patents originally asserted against Roku, the defendant provides this visual guide:

The Western District of Texas case was assigned to a generic pool of cases over which District Judge Robert Pitman presides. In July 2024, after a period of venue-related discovery and related briefing, the court granted Roku’s motion to transfer the case for convenience to the Northern District of California, where it was assigned to Judge Chhabria. Roku immediately filed a motion to stay the case in light of IPR petitions filed by the defendants. The court granted the motion, lifting it again in April 2025 after no trials were instituted in response to any of those petitions. The next day, Roku file a motion for judgment on the pleadings.

That motion argues that the patents claims are ineligibly drawn to “simple mental processes for analyzing and manipulating play stream data”. (After Anonymous Media added the ‘883 patent to the case through an amended complaint, Roku filed a supplemental brief attacking the patent on the same basis.) In a September 12, 2025 order (and accompanying judgment), Judge Chhabria agreed, invaliding all seven patents. Per the court, “Each of the representative claims follows the same basic structure. Each recites: (1) one or more content recognition steps that results in a ‘play stream’ or a list of content identifications; and (2) a data analysis process. Some of the representative claims include an additional step of generating a media measurement report”:

The patents are invalid because they are directed to an unpatentable abstract idea without a saving inventive concept. Each patent lays out a generalized process for how to solve a particular problem relating to raw ACR data, that is, ordered content data that is obtained using pre-existing ACR technology. The Scrubbing Patents (Patents ’768, ’848, and ’883) lay out a data cleaning methodology based on simple reasoning: where there is a data point with a missing or incongruent content ID in between two data points that share the same content ID, the middle data point should also be assigned that content ID. The method described in the Channel Matching Patents (Patents ’622 and ’849) is essentially a comparison of the sequence of a user’s consumed content against the sequences of content played on specific channels in order to figure out what channels a user was listening to. The deduction of play-altering actions described in the Playback Tracking Patents (Patents ’791 and ’896) is based on simple inferences about timing discontinuities that appear in a user’s content data. Given the raw ACR data, a person with basic arithmetic skills could implement the solutions described by AMRH, albeit not at the speed and scale of a computer.

(Citation to the Alice case omitted.)

Meanwhile, the Eastern District of Texas denied a motion to stay pending those ultimately unsuccessful IPRs, issued a claim construction order this past March, and ruled on competing motions for summary judgment in the leadup to trial on the Alice issue. On September 10, 2025, two days before Judge Chhabria’s ruling in California, in a report and recommendation, Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne denied Samsung’s motion and granted Anonymous Media’s:

Defendants devote much of their argument to contending that the patents are not novel, that they did not invent automatic content recognition (ACR) or add any inventive concepts to the technology. That may be relevant to defenses of anticipation or novelty, but it does not render the subject matter abstract. The Court finds persuasive Plaintiff’s argument that the asserted claims of the three patents are directed to a specific implementations [sic] of solutions to problems in the software arts and are accordingly not abstract.

(Citation to the Enfish case omitted.) On September 10, Samsung filed objections to Judge Payne’s recommendation. Two days later, it filed a notice of Judge Chhabria’s ruling in California. Three days after that, it filed a motion for leave to file a late motion for summary judgment of collateral estoppel, arguing that the California ruling should end the Texas case as well. It asked the Texas court to expedite briefing on that motion, as trial was then imminent. Anonymous Media opposed, countering that the Texas ruling from Judge Payne came first. On September 18, Judge Gilstrap adopted Judge Payne’s report and recommendation on the Alice issues and denied the motion for leave to file a motion for summary judgment on collateral estoppel, ruling that “a subsequent decision that disagrees with the prior decision of a different court does not require the prior court to revisit its decision” and noting that Samsung had not included in its answer the affirmative defense of collateral estoppel (or issue preclusion), the deadline for amendment of which had “passed months ago”.

The next day, Samsung filed an amended answer with an issue preclusion affirmative defense, but the trial went forward on September 22, leading to the jury verdict noted above. A question regarding the second step of the Alice analysis (involving factual determinations) was not submitted to the East Texas jury because the court had determined that the asserted claims are not, as a matter of law, directed to abstract ideas in the first step. Anonymous Media filed its appeal of Judge Chhabria’s Alice invalidation on September 19. An appeal from the Texas result seems likely, with the Federal Circuit left to sort all of this out in the months (perhaps years) ahead, unless settlements otherwise do.

Named inventors Otto and Steuer assigned rights to this family to “Anonymous Media, LLC” for which Steuer signed (as its manager) in a transfer of the assets to Anonymous Media Research, LLC, a Delaware entity formed in March 2009. Steuer signed for that company as well, as its managing member, when the family was moved in July 2023 to the more recently formed plaintiff, the “Holdings” entity (created in Delaware on March 2, 2023). The development work for these patents appears to have grown out of an association between Otto and Steuer while at Stanford University and thereafter.

Steuer identifies himself on social media as having been the CEO and cofounder of Anonymous Media Research since October 2003, describing his work there as having “developed patented single-source cross-media audience measurement tools based on audio fingerprinting / pattern matching technology (8 US patents; others pending)” and further suggesting that “Anonymous currently offers consulting services in the areas of media research, strategy and measurement”. The next most recent position for Steuer appears to have been as “EVP, TV Strategy & Currency” with VideoAmp, from August 2020 through September 2022.

Otto reports on social media having been the “Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer” for Anonymous Media Research since January 2017 after holding the role of “SVP Product & Business Development” there from November 2003 through April 2006. Around those stints, Otto held technology and/or music positions with various companies, indicating that he received a Master’s degree in 2002 from Stanford University in “Music, Science & Technology”.

In its amended complaints, Anonymous Media provides additional material, including an introductory gloss on the background here:

This case involves two innovators—Jonathan Steuer and Christopher Otto—who poured years of their own individual effort and a significant chunk of their own savings into the development of technology that would make automatic content recognition useful for media measurement, as part of a start-up business called Anonymous Media. Like many start-up companies, after devoting the resources to refining several iterations of a prototype, paying vendors, and pitching investors, Anonymous Media was unable to commercialize its business model. Despite this, Mr. Steuer and Mr. Otto continued to prosecute the patent applications they had filed on their inventions, as resources allowed, on the hope that one day their technology would be successful. Eventually, however, large advertising players like Roku began to dominate the space, preventing smaller start-ups from gaining a foothold in the business. So, Mr. Steuer and Mr. Otto sought a license from Roku (and others) directly for use of their patented inventions. Roku refused. Accordingly, Mr. Steuer and Mr. Otto, through their company Anonymous Media Research Holdings, LLC, seek to hold Roku accountable for their willful infringement and protect the inventions claimed in the asserted patents from Roku’s unlawful use.

The Northern District of California requires litigants to file a certification of interested parties upon filing or transfer there. Here, it appears that neither Anonymous Media nor Roku did so after the case was opened before Judge Chhabria. Local rules also require any Joint Case Management Report to include a separate section addressing the parties’ certificates of interested parties. Here, it appears that Anonymous Media and Roku never filed such a report. However, other public records indicate that Anonymous Media has received funding from a hedge fund; that secured party would ostensibly be included in such a list of interested parties.

In Texas, which does not impose heightened disclosure on litigants, Anonymous Media merely disclosed that its “parent corporation” is Anonymous Media Research, LLC and that no publicly held corporation owns ten percent or more of its “stock”.

Ahmad Zavitsanos & Mensing, PLLC represents Anonymous in this campaign.