Showing 11 - 20 of 406 news articles
Each week, RPX publishes the latest news on patent litigation and market trends. Never miss a headline. Get them delivered right to your inbox.
Judge Alsup Orders Unsealing of Fortress-Uniloc Licensing Info in Apple Suit, Seeking to “Police” the “Litigation Gimmick” of “Bloated” Royalty Demands
Top Insight
Late last year, a battle over standing unfolded in litigation between Apple and Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited (Uniloc). Apple had moved to dismiss four of the NPE’s cases against it after learning of a complex set of agreements between Uniloc and Fortress Investment Group LLC, asserting that Uniloc’s purported “defaults” under those agreements had deprived it of standing by shifting certain rights in the asserted patents to Fortress. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California denied that motion in January, and Apple’s motion for reconsideration of that order remains pending. Now, a related, parallel dispute over confidentiality has come to a head: Judge Alsup has ruled, for the second time, that Uniloc has sought to withhold too much information about its agreements with Fortress, its prior licenses, and other related documents, declining to reconsider his earlier denial of the NPE’s first request to seal and rejecting its attempt to seek a more limited set of redactions. Judge Alsup cited the inherent public interest in learning information on patent ownership, licensing, and related standing issues as well as Uniloc’s failure to seek more limited relief in the first instance.
May 10, 2019
NPE Relaunches Campaign with Two Patents Arising from Reissue Applications Filed after Earlier IPR Invalidations
New Patent Litigation
In February of this year, the USPTO issued to Wildcat Licensing WI LLC two patents that the NPE obtained based on reissue applications filed after their earlier predecessors were invalidated through inter partes review (IPR). Wildcat Licensing WI began litigating those prior patents in May 2013 in a campaign that appeared to close in December 2016 when the Federal Circuit affirmed the cancellation of all challenged claims through two IPRs brought by district court defendant Johnson Controls. That closure, however, has proved only temporary; Wildcat Licensing WI has now rebooted its campaign, filing suit against BMW (1:19-cv-00834), Faurecia (1:19-cv-00839), Fiat Chrysler (FCA US, FCA Italy) (1:19-cv-00840), Ford (1:19-cv-00842), GM (1:19-cv-00843), Lear (1:19-cv-00845), Magna International (1:19-cv-00846), and TATA (Jaguar Land Rover) (1:19-cv-00844), and Volkswagen (Audi) (1:19-cv-00833). The two asserted reissue patents are described as “encompass[ing] core technology in the field of assembling articles of manufacture”; infringement allegations focus on the provision of vehicles and automotive components manufactured using methods that “perform error free fastening or error-proofing automated assembly”.
May 10, 2019
Mobile Device Display Backlights Targeted in New IPVal Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Kamino LLC, a recently formed affiliate of IPValuation Partners, LLC (d/b/a IPVal), has kicked off a litigation campaign over a single patent generally related to a light-conducting plate for an LCD backlight. The new complaints accuse F5cs (5:19-cv-00057), Panasonic (5:19-cv-00058), and Yulong Computer Communications (Coolpad Technologies) (5:19-cv-00056) of infringement through the provision of mobile devices, calling out certain features of the display backlights for the Panasonic Toughpad, the Fusion5 10.1 Inch Tablet PC, and Coolpad’s Defiant smartphone and Rogue tablet.
May 9, 2019
A Second Alice-Octane Storm Weathered, IP Edge Keeps on Filing
Patent Litigation Feature
As RPX’s recently published Patent Litigation and Marketplace Report notes, IP Edge LLC landed at the top of the list of most frequent filers for 2018, a spot familiar to the Texas monetization firm from previous years (see here and here). Its affiliates added nearly 200 defendants to campaigns over the course of last year, and, as RPX noted last week, the firm recently acquired a portfolio of US patents from Huawei, which the week in between has already seen translated into four new litigation campaigns (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). The former Huawei patents join portfolios acquired directly from Panasonic (in October 2017) and Siemens (in October 2018), which the monetization firm has been asserting in multiple litigation campaigns since. This burst of activity over patents acquired in bundles from operating companies comes as IP Edge has weathered a second Alice-Octane storm that ended one of its affiliate’s litigation campaigns, this time hitting in Delaware rather than in Texas.
May 5, 2019
Mesa Digital Expands Smartphone Campaign after USPTO Issues Yet Another Patent in the Asserted Family
New Patent Litigation
Mesa Digital LLC has expanded its long-running campaign, litigated by three different, affiliated plaintiffs, suing Apple (3:19-cv-02403) in the Northern District of California, LG Electronics (LGE) (3:19-cv-00823) in the Southern District of California, and Samsung (1:19-cv-03957) in the Eastern District of Texas. The complaints all assert three patents generally related to “multimedia” mobile devices; they belong to a large and growing family, other members of which have been concurrently asserted by Ortiz & Associates Consulting, LLC (OAC). The new suits have been filed as prior cases—against Alphabet (Google), HP Inc., and Huawei—have ended and as the District of Delaware considers an Alice challenge to the patents that the plaintiff has asserted, there against Roku, as patent-ineligibly drawn to the abstract idea of “transmitting data over a network to a display device”.
May 4, 2019
Hotspot Campaign Snags Second Defendant
New Patent Litigation
Roughly one week after suing Apple in the Northern District of California, WiNet Labs LLC has asserted the same patent, generally related to a hierarchical protocol for forming an “ad-hoc network", against Samsung (1:19-cv-3903), filing the second suit of the NPE’s only campaign in the Southern District of New York. WiNet Labs targets the provision on the Galaxy S4 smartphone of Group Play, a content-sharing feature where a “group leader” creates a group, which generates a Wi-Fi access point that other participants connect to, allowing them to share music, photos, documents, and games.
May 4, 2019
Irish NPE Launches Second OLED Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Solas OLED Limited has opened up a second litigation campaign, this time suing Samsung (2:19-cv-00152) over a single former Atmel patent generally related to a flexible touch sensor comprising a conductive mesh grid and a flexible substrate that are “configured to wrap around one or more edges of a display”. The NPE, formed in Ireland in March 2016, targets Samsung’s provision of Galaxy smartphones with “touchscreens (including flexible touch sensors) that wrap around the edges of the display”. This new case follows by about a month Solas OLED’s first suit, which accused LG Display, LG Electronics (LGE), and Sony of infringing a single patent received from the University of Stuttgart and generally related to a “driving circuit” for “image points” on an OLED (“organic light-emitting diode”) screen.
May 4, 2019
Four Semiconductor Patents, of Familiar Named Inventorship, Asserted by Plaintiff New to Litigation
New Patent Litigation
Samsung (2:19-cv-00147) has been sued by Greenthread, LLC, a Texas NPE, over a four-patent family generally related to CMOS semiconductor devices with “graded dopant regions”. In January 2019, Greenthread granted a security interest in the patents to Patent Capital Funding 2018 – Series 1A, LLC, an entity formed in Delaware last November, years after Greenthread received the family from sole named inventor G.R. Mohan Rao, whose patents have been asserted in litigation by multiple NPEs. Greenthread accuses Samsung of infringement through the provision of various semiconductor products that allegedly contain “graded dopant regions”.
May 4, 2019
Finjan Announces Settlement with Zscaler
Patent Market, Patent Watch
Finjan Holdings, Inc. announced on May 1 that it has entered into a patent license and settlement agreement with Zscaler, resolving all claims between them, including litigation in the Northern District of California. According to an 8-K filed by Finjan, Zscaler has paid the company $7.25M and (along with certain affiliates) will receive “a license to, among others, the patents of Finjan, Finjan Mobile, Inc., and Finjan Blue, Inc.” The agreement was apparently reached amid claim construction briefing ahead of a May 28 Markman hearing. It follows Finjan’s string of settlements last year with Symantec (for up to $110M), Carbon Black (for $3.9M), and Trend Micro ($13.4M).
May 3, 2019
DOJ Antitrust Policy Change Favoring SEP Injunctions Sparks Debate with Tech and Auto Industries
Top Insight
US antitrust policy toward standard essential patent (SEP) licensing has historically focused on anticompetitive behavior by patent holders. In 2013, this posture was formalized in a joint policy statement issued by the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the USPTO, which in part cautioned against the imposition of injunctive relief in SEP licensing disputes in most circumstances. However, in late 2017, the DOJ began signaling that it would chart a new course on SEP antitrust enforcement favoring the use of exclusionary remedies for SEP holders—a policy shift that was made official this past December, when the Antitrust Division formally withdrew from the 2013 policy statement. These changes have sparked a heated debate, with those supporting the existing policy arguing forcefully for its return. The latest of those efforts is an open letter released on April 22 by a coalition of stakeholders including tech companies, automakers, and industry trade associations urging that the USPTO remain a party to the agreement, warning that abandoning decades of well-established, bipartisan policy would harm innovation.
May 3, 2019