BiTMICRO, LLC has sued Western Digital (8:24-cv-01903) in the Central District of California, targeting the provision of solid state drives (SSDs) with certain encryption features, those using the NVMe protocol, and those with SLC caching functionality, as well as NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric) storage platforms. Four patents, familiar to this campaign, are asserted; the plaintiff describes them as relating to “groundbreaking improvements to memory controllers, mapping tables for memory devices, NVMe over Fabrics technologies, and data security”. BiTMICRO has yet to file its certification of interested parties in connection with the new case, but it has previously identified its members, in connection with a case transferred to the Northern District of California.

Daedalus Blue LLC has filed a District of Delaware complaint against Dropbox (1:24-cv-00998), alleging infringement of three former IBM patents through the provision of various products, including the Dropbox API, Magic Pocket storage system, and Nautilus search engine. At issue are features such as the support for file management and OAuth 2.0. The plaintiff pleads that the asserted patents have been licensed to “many companies”, including Amazon, Oracle, and Dropbox itself, but that “that license expired”.

Websock Global Strategies LLC (WGS) has expanded its sole litigation campaign with suits against ABLY Realtime, Adobe, Alchemy Insights, Apollo Graph, Autodesk, Discord, Ericsson (Vonage Holdings), NetApp, Postman, RingCentral, Rocket.Chat Technologies, ServiceNow, SignalWire, Twilio, Wallarm, and Zendesk, all in the District of Delaware. At issue in each complaint is a single patent generally related to symmetric communications between a browser and a server; the defendants are targeted over the support for the WebSocket protocol (as defined under IETF RFC 6455) in their various products and services.

Hon Hai Precision Industry (Belkin) (2:24-cv-07486), PowerFleet (2:24-cv-00718), and Senao Networks (2:24-cv-00705) are the latest defendants to be sued in the litigation campaign that Empire IP LLC plaintiff Fleet Connect Solutions LLC (FCS) launched in December 2020 over a portfolio of patents acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). The 14 patents-in-suit, asserted in overlapping sets, are broadly directed to various aspects of wireless communications, including container status transmission, field assessment technologies, and packet transmission. The defendants are accused of infringement through a wide array of products, ranging from fleet management systems to networking devices, with support for various wireless communication capabilities—including Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11ac/b/n, and LTE—at issue.

The Federal Circuit has backed Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly’s authority to explore whether a fraud may have been perpetrated on the court and/or on the USPTO via certain LLC plaintiffs, including by requiring the human owners of those LLCs to appear in person before him. Not only has Judge Connolly ordered one of those owners, Texas paralegal Lori LaPray, to show up in Delaware on September 18, ready to pay a $53K civil contempt fine, he has also ordered Swirlate IP LLC to make a document production to the court, in full and unredacted this time, with Dina Gamez (Swirlate IP’s sole owner) and David R. Bennett of Direction IP Law (its counsel) also expected in person on September 18. The owners of other plaintiffs before Judge Connolly, including those of Creekview IP LLC, MISSED CALL, LLC, and SAFE IP LLC, are on notice that their own dates are likely now coming.

Another high-profile, international standard essential patent (SEP) dispute has taken a detour—albeit, a brief one—through US state law. In late July, HP filed suit in the Massachusetts Superior Court Business Litigation Session against Access Advance LLC, the administrator of patent pool HEVC Advance, and patent owners Dolby, Mitsubishi Electric, and Philips. The complaint alleges that the parties breached their commitments to license their SEPs on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms by failing to offer a lower rate accounting for HP’s existing rights to 70% of the pool’s patents, and by filing litigation in Germany and before the Unified Patent Court (UPC) in an improper attempt to force it to take a license. Among other claims for relief, the complaint seeks a declaratory judgment of the terms and conditions for a FRAND license to the remaining unlicensed patents. Now, the defendants have removed that case to the Federal District of Massachusetts.

Western District of Texas Judge Robert L. Pitman just transferred a case filed by DH International Ltd. against Apple last September, for convenience, to the Northern District of California. In doing so, the court denied a motion for three months of venue discovery; found the most important factor (cost of attendance for willing witnesses) “weighs heavily toward transfer”, crediting “Apple’s contention that none of its relevant employees are in WDTX and that most of them are located in California” as “especially weighty”; and assessed the most speculative factor (court congestion) as tilting slightly in favor of transfer, noting that “recent time-to-trial statistics indicate that the median time-to-trial for patent cases is 526 days in the NDCA, but 827 days in this district”. That approach (and result) lands in stark relief against other recent transfer rulings from elsewhere in West Texas.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), a nonprofit patent management arm of the University of Wisconsin, has seen another key setback in its litigation against Apple. In 2018, the Federal Circuit overturned a $506M judgment for the plaintiff in the first of two cases, holding that Apple had not literally infringed the asserted patent through the provision of certain mobile chips based on the plain and ordinary meaning of a key claim limitation. Now, the Federal Circuit has affirmed a 2022 ruling that the company could not revive that first suit based on a doctrine-of-equivalents (DOE) theory, concluding in an August 28 precedential decision that WARF had waived that theory by agreeing not to raise it at trial. The Federal Circuit additionally held that a second WARF suit targeting newer versions of the accused Apple processors, also under a DOE theory, was precluded by the outcome of the first case—in the process expanding the standards governing issue preclusion and the Kessler doctrine.

General Video, LLC has filed separate complaints against Acer (5:24-cv-00125), ASUSTek (5:24-cv-00126), Dell (5:24-cv-00124), HP (5:24-cv-00123), and Lenovo (5:24-cv-00122) in the Eastern District of Texas. Asserted against each defendant are six data transmission patents described as “generally directed to the high-speed, efficient, and secure transmission of audio and video data between transmitting and receiving devices”, and targeted is the provision of a wide array of products—organized under “four general categories” in the complaints: laptop computers, desktop computers, computer monitors, and video/graphics cards—that are compliant with various DisplayPort standards.

The last of Mobility Workx, LLC’s Eastern District of Texas cases against the big three US wireless carriers, targeting AT&T (AT&T Mobility), ended this past July. The plaintiff has now filed separate complaints in the same district against Cisco (4:24-cv-00799), Ericsson (4:24-cv-00796), Nokia (4:24-cv-00797), and Samsung (4:24-cv-00798). Two patents generally related to the allocation of network resources are asserted against each defendant, with a third patent, broadly pertaining to mobile network emulation, also at issue against Ericsson and Samsung. The accused products include a broad range of mobile devices and wireless networking equipment.