The past two weeks have seen juries in two popular patent venues hand down infringement verdicts. On October 16, a Delaware jury found that smartphone maker HTC infringed two cellular networking patents asserted against it by 3G Licensing S.A. and awarded $9M in damages, just the latest chapter in a slimmed-down case that has survived a trip to the Federal Circuit and back. The week before, a jury in the Western District of Texas issued a $240M verdict for StreamScale, Inc. against Cloudera, finding that the company infringed three data protection patents held by the inventor-controlled plaintiff.

Last September, District Judge Gregory B. Williams took the federal Delaware bench, alongside Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly and Judges Richard G. Andrews and Maryellen Noreika, after Judge Leonard P. Stark left to join the Federal Circuit. Delaware has long been one of the busiest venues for patent litigation; it is therefore no surprise that six months into his tenure Judge Williams has now faced and resolved a good number of issues arising from the patent portion of his docket. In that time, with several trials on the horizon, he has issued multiple claim construction rulings; considered and resolved multiple Alice challenges; addressed discovery related to a third-party litigation funder; navigated, at least initially, a potential standing issue arising from the international source of patents that the plaintiff purportedly acquired through a receivership; and refused to enter a default judgment because the plaintiff’s pleading in the complaint “can charitably be described as sparse”, too sparse to establish infringement even upon default.

PanOptis Patent Management, LLC; Optis Cellular Technology, LLC; Unwired Planet, LLC; and Unwired Planet International Limited (collectively, PanOptis) have sued Ford (2:22-cv-00133) in the Eastern District of Texas, asserting a group of former Ericsson or Panasonic patents and targeting connected vehicles alleged to communicate according to the 4G/LTE cellular network standard. PanOptis appears to be the latest to join a line of Avanci, LLC licensors taking aim at Ford.

Fineur International S.A. subsidiaries Sisvel International S.A. (d/b/a Sisvel Group), Sisvel S.p.A., and 3G Licensing S.A. (collectively, Sisvel) have added a Delaware case against Ford (1:21-cv-01745) to the networking litigation that began as separate campaigns that have morphed into one since June 2019. Sisvel asserts five of the 21 patents-in-campaign in the new complaint against Ford, three developed by Nokia and one each by BlackBerry and LG Electronics (LGE), all of them generally directed to various aspects of wireless communications. The plaintiff alleges that the patents are essential to either 3G or 4G cellular standards, with infringement allegations targeting the provision of compliant automobile services, including SYNC Connect, FordPass SmartLink, and FordPass Connect.

NPE litigation in the Automotive market sector during the first four months of 2020 was up nearly threefold from the same time period last year. Most recently, 21ST CENTURY GARAGE LLC and Sisvel International S.A. (d/b/a Sisvel Group) have taken aim at companies operating in the sector, but the year so far has seen new campaigns launched by plaintiffs ranging from relatively recent entrants to patent monetization (e.g., Quartz Auto Technologies, LLC) to established players (e.g., Conversant Wireless Licensing, S.à.r.l.), as well as additional cases filed in existing campaigns waged by inventor-controlled Omega Patents, L.L.C. and frequent plaintiff Leigh M. Rothschild. From wireless connectivity to more traditional automotive technologies, something about 2020 has drawn more litigation to the sector.

Earlier this month, Sisvel International S.A. (d/b/a Sisvel Group) added a District of Delaware case against Dell to the networking campaign that it began in that district in June with suits against six other defendants. The original complaints in the June cases asserted five former Nokia patents, but subsequent amended complaints added accusations as to seven former BlackBerry patents (or a subset of those patents) to all prior complaints except the BLU Products complaint. Dell was hit with all 12 patents at once, as is the situation with Sisvel’s new suit against ZTE (3:19-cv-01694), filed in the Northern District of Texas by Sisvel and a sister subsidiary, 3G Licensing S.A., to which Sisvel pleads that it assigned the former BlackBerry patents on July 11, 2019. ZTE is accused of infringement through the provision of the Axon, Blade, Grand, and Nubia series smartphones.

The US Supreme Court caused a dramatic realignment in patent venue through its May 2017 decision in TC Heartland, ruling that the patent-specific venue statute governs in patent suits and confirming that corporations “reside” in their state of incorporation. However, in that opinion, the Court explicitly declined to address any impact on foreign defendants or to revisit an earlier holding that preserved a far more expansive rule for such parties. That 1972 decision, Brunette Machine Works v. Kockum Industries, reaffirmed that foreign defendants may be sued in any district, a longstanding principle known as the “alien venue rule”. Now, the Court has strengthened Brunette by denying a petition for certiorari in which HTC had argued that Brunette was inconsistent with TC Heartland and the general venue statute, as amended in 2011.

Delaware District Judge Leonard P. Stark has ruled that a wireless data patent asserted against a host of mobile device makers—including BlackBerry, HTC, Lenovo, LG Electronics (LGE), and TCL—is invalid under Alice. Judge Stark’s March 22 opinion acknowledged the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Aatrix Software v. Green Shades Software, which bars a Rule 12 Alice decision on subject matter eligibility when factual disputes remain over a patent’s inventiveness, but the court’s Section 101 analysis otherwise focused on issues of law as in pre-Aatrix cases. The invalidated patent is one of several at issue in a campaign jointly waged by patent monetization and licensing firm Sisvel International S.A. and Koninklijke KPN N.V., a telecom provider based in the Netherlands.

Recent European litigation activity has included several developments in German cases brought by subsidiaries of American NPEs, with a stay entered in two lawsuits brought by ParkerVision, Inc. and the affirmance of an injunction for Xperi Corporation. Meanwhile, plaintiffs originating in Europe have varied widely in size, financial resources, and level of activity, with one of Europe’s most persistent litigants (IPCom GmbH & Co KG) backed by financing from the US-based Fortress Investment Group LLC.

RPX took notice, among the USPTO assignment records made available during the latter part of February, of the transfer of patents from operating companies Dongbu, Eastman Kodak, Honeywell, IBM, and Koninklijke Philips to various NPEs. One of those NPEs (Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited) has already launched a campaign asserting the patents that it received (from IBM). RPX also saw during this time the recordation of the assignment of one two-way radio patent from one litigating NPE to another (the second, an affiliate of IP Edge LLC) and the assignment of two database management patents from a Daniel F. Perez entity that asserted them in litigation back to the Georgia patent monetization firm from which that NPE acquired them.