The Fifth Circuit has ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by automotive component supplier Continental against Internet of Things (IoT) licensing platform Avanci, LLC and several licensing partners. On February 28, the court determined that the plaintiff was not an “intended beneficiary” of the Avanci patent owners’ contractual commitments to license their standard essential patents (SEPs) on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. As a result, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the company had not suffered a sufficient injury from the defendants’ refusal to grant it a license, which in turn deprived it of Article III standing.

Publicly traded NPE Finjan Holdings, Inc. has announced a product partnership with German security software provider Avira, the same day that the two companies entered into an apparently separate $4.9M patent license agreement. Under the terms of the partnership, formed on April 21 and revealed in an April 26 press release, Finjan subsidiary Finjan Mobile, Inc. will integrate Avira’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) platform into its own VitalSecurity mobile browser suite. This deal is the first of its kind for Finjan, which continues to wage a decade-long litigation campaign that has seen multiple trials and settlements, and comes as other publicly traded NPEs have signaled that they intend to diversify their activities and move beyond patent assertion alone.

The Federal Circuit has overturned a judgment of non-infringement in Unwired Planet LLC’s infringement suit against Apple (2015-1725). In a precedential opinion issued on July 22, 2016, the court partially vacated multiple summary judgment orders handed down in April and May 2015 by District Judge Vince Chhabria, who had ruled that Apple did not infringe four of the patents-in-suit (6,317,831; 6,321,092; 6,532,446; 6,647,260). However, the Federal Circuit reversed as to three of the asserted patents, holding that Judge Chhabria had relied on improper constructions of certain terms from the ‘446 and ‘260 patents, and that he had applied the wrong legal standard with respect to the ‘092 patent.