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Patent Armory Adds Nearly 20 Defendants to Its First Litigation Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Last week, Patent Armory Inc. filed another wave of litigation in a campaign that has focused, at least in significant part, on customer service systems that support routing/triage tools, suing Auntie Anne’s (2:24-cv-00232), Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop (2:24-cv-00236), and Charter Communications (2:24-cv-00237) in the Eastern District of Texas; Barclays (4:24-cv-01282) in the Southern District of Texas; BBDI (6:24-cv-00176), Chuy’s Holdings (6:24-cv-00178), Dell (6:24-cv-00180), Fiesta Restaurant Group (Texas Taco Cabana) (6:24-cv-00184), Fired Up (6:24-cv-00182), PayPal (6:24-cv-00183), UNUM (6:24-cv-00191), UnitedHealthCare Services (6:24-cv-00190), and Wells Fargo (6:24-cv-00192) in the Western District of Texas; Oscar Health (1:24-cv-02816) and Mastercard (1:24-cv-02815) in the Southern District of New York; TDM IP Holder (1:24-cv-00969) in the District of Colorado; Thrivent Investment Management (3:24-cv-00236) in the Western District of Wisconsin; and United Airlines (1:24-cv-02921) in the Northern District of Illinois. Similar to its most recent complaints, a majority of the new suits cite exhibits allegedly detailing accused products that are missing from their respective dockets.
April 11, 2024
California Court Dismisses “Hotly Pursued” License Claim, Intel Turns Back to Texas
In Case You Missed It
Intel has been trying to litigate whether an earlier license agreement with Finjan, Inc. provides a defense in the multidistrict campaign of VLSI Technology LLC against it. Last week, Northern District of California Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled that a forum selection clause in that license agreement requires any claim be brought in Delaware, the court dismissing the lone remaining license claim for forum non conveniens rather than transferring it to the District of Delaware. Also last week, Intel filed a motion to amend its answer, defenses, and counterclaims in the Western District of Texas to add the license defense there.
April 8, 2024
Atlantic IP Pegs Four Defendants Again
New Patent Litigation
Eireog Innovations Limited, an Atlantic Services IP Limited plaintiff, has filed its first cases over the portfolio of about a dozen patents that it received from NXP last November. The defendants are Cisco (2:24-cv-00224), Fortinet (2:24-cv-00225), IBM (2:24-cv-00226), and Palo Alto Networks (2:24-cv-00227), each accused of infringing the same four patents over the provision of products, ranging from blade servers to firewalls, that incorporate certain AMD- and/or Intel-based CPUs. This set of defendants is familiar to Atlantic IP.
April 6, 2024
Formal Rulemaking Not Required for NHK-Fintiv, Holds California Court
Patent Litigation Feature
An ongoing lawsuit targeting discretionary denial practices at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has hit a potentially decisive setback. In August 2020, a group of tech companies filed suit against then-USPTO Director Andrew Iancu over the agency’s precedential NHK-Fintiv rule, which allows the PTAB to deny institution in an America Invents Act (AIA) review based on the status of a parallel district court case asserting the same patent. Earlier this year, the case was narrowed to a single issue—whether NHK-Fintiv is invalid because the agency had failed to adopt it through notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—after the Supreme Court decided not to revisit an earlier Federal Circuit ruling. Now, Northern District of California District Judge Edward J. Davila has granted summary judgment for current Director Kathi Vidal, holding that NHK-Fintiv is not a substantive rule but a general statement of agency policy that falls outside the APA’s rulemaking requirement.
April 6, 2024
Headwater Litigation Heats Up
New Patent Litigation
Headwater Research LLC filed its first of several cases against Samsung back in October 2022. Since Samsung filed an amended answer to plead three additional affirmative defenses (inequitable conduct and “infectious unenforceability”, lack of standing, and prosecution laches), disputes have been multiplying, including over more typical issues (e.g., amendment of infringement contentions, stay in light of inter partes review (IPR), propriety of certain expert opinions, etc.) but also over the release of US discovery for use in parallel proceedings in Germany, the production of clawed-back documents and any related waiver of privilege, the consideration of battery testing evidence, and—at the end of last week—a sealed request to sanction the plaintiff. Meanwhile, the Eastern District of Texas has handed down a claim construction order, and Headwater Research has filed yet another complaint against Samsung (2:24-cv-00228), bringing three more patents from the same large family into this fray.
April 6, 2024
Per HP, AX Wireless Did Not Exist Then—and Does Not Exist Now
In Case You Missed It
In July 2022, AX Wireless, LLC—a plaintiff formed in Texas but operating among the monetization programs of South Korea’s Ideahub, Inc. (d/b/a IDEAHUB)—sued Dell, HP, and Lenovo in separate Eastern District of Texas complaints, adding a case in the same district against Acer in February of last year. Asserted now are eight patents described by the plaintiff as “directed to wireless OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) networks and systems”, with infringement allegations targeting compliance with the Wi-Fi 6 networking standard. Ax Wireless pleaded ownership of the asserted patents, but briefing has just completed on HP’s motion to dismiss the case against it for lack of subject matter jurisdiction in which it argues that the plaintiff could not have received the patents from Applied Transform LLC in August 2021 because the plaintiff did not exist on that date.
April 6, 2024
Patent Armory, Fighting Earlier Motions to Dismiss, Continues Filing into April
New Patent Litigation
Patent Armory Inc. has sued Adidas (6:24-cv-00173) and American Express (6:24-cv-00174) in a campaign that has largely focused on certain routing/triage tools within the defendants' customer service systems—though this latest batch of complaints cites exhibits allegedly detailing the accused products that are missing from their respective dockets. Appearing in the pair of Western District of Texas complaints are the same five patents that Patent Armory has asserted against a long list of defendants, including, at least originally, Hertz. There, Hertz has filed three successive motions for judgment on the pleadings, among other things challenging the patents asserted against it as patent-ineligibly drawn, under Alice, to the abstract idea of “evaluating communications data to make a routing decision”.
April 5, 2024
Charter Sued in Atlantic IP’s Optical Networking Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Atlantic IP Services Limited plaintiff Iarnach Technologies Limited has sued a third defendant in its optical networking campaign, hitting Charter Communications (Spectrum Gulf Coast, Spectrum Management) (2:24-cv-00230) over the provision of products necessary for providing DPoE v2.0-compliant networks—including “all hardware and software, optical line terminals (ONTs), and optical network units (ONUs)/optical network terminals (ONTs), transport networks, and DOCSIS back office equipment”. Iarnach previously sued AT&T (AT&T Mobility and several other subsidiaries) in a May 2023 case in which Nokia has successfully intervened and Verizon (Verizon Wireless and several other subsidiaries) in a December 2023 case, all three suits filed in the Eastern District of Texas.
April 5, 2024
Pro Se Plaintiff Asserts Caller ID Patent against Google
New Patent Litigation
Proceeding pro se, individual inventor Jeffrey D. Isaacs has sued Alphabet (Google) (9:24-cv-80395) in the Southern District of Florida. The sole asserted patent, described by the plaintiff as “groundbreaking reverse phone search technology”, is broadly directed to a system for caller identification. Google is accused of infringement through the provision of mobile apps on the Google Play Store that support features for searching a CNAM (Calling Name Presentation) database to obtain a “Caller Name” associated with a phone number.
April 5, 2024
Avaya Divests VoIP Portfolio to Dominion Harbor
Patent Market, Patent Watch
Though the deal has yet to be fully reflected in public USPTO assignment records, Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC announced on April 3, 2024 that its subsidiary Arlington Technologies, LLC has acquired a “significant portfolio of patents” related to “pioneering voice over internet protocol (VOIP) technology and include more than 675 families, totaling over 1,500 individual patent assets”. The source is Avaya, described in Dominion’s press release as “a global leader in customer experience and communications solutions”. Per David Pridham, Dominion’s chairman and CEO, in that release, “While these patents are no longer core to Avaya’s cloud-based strategy, they will serve as valuable technology resources for companies worldwide that want to provide the best possible VOIP service and care to their customers”.
April 5, 2024