The Federal Circuit has turned away appeals from the final judgment of Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright based on a June 2021 jury verdict of noninfringement and a subsequent bench trial finding no inequitable conduct. The plaintiffs here are Freshub Ltd. and its US subsidiary Freshub, Inc.; found not to have infringed is Amazon, as well as several subsidiaries, including Whole Foods Market. In the district court’s denial of Freshub’s motion for judgment as a matter of law and for a new trial, Judge Albright ordered three attorneys from Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP and one from Naman Howell Smith & Lee PLLC to “complete thirty (30) hours of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) of legal ethics and shall certify his/her completion of the CLE hours to the Court within six months from the date of this Order”.

Western District of Texas Judge Xavier Rodriguez has stayed consideration of a Microsoft motion for sanctions against Ramey LLP, frequent plaintiff-side counsel in NPE patent cases, after CTD Networks LLC appealed Judge Rogriguez’s judgment against it. Among other things, CTD Networks and Ramey LLP, its counsel, filed amended pleadings that failed to address the court’s repeated, fatal pleading inadequacy concerns. Now, Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright has dismissed a case that mCom IP, LLC filed against it after mCom IP, represented by Ramey LLP, failed to appear at a hearing to address Cisco’s motion to dismiss with prejudice an amended complaint there. Meanwhile, Western District of Texas Judge Robert L. Pitman has denied a request by LS Cloud Storage Technologies, LLC to revive a suit against Amazon, that suit having been dismissed with prejudice after the plaintiff, represented by Ramey LLP, failed even to meet a deadline by which to file an amended complaint.

This past March, LS Cloud Storage Technologies, LLC kicked off its sole litigation campaign, accusing Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Cisco, and Microsoft in separate Western District of Texas complaints of infringing overlapping subsets of “cached data storage” patents. The cases were assigned to District Judge Alan D. Albright, who still presides over three of those suits; however, a disagreement about the timing for the service of infringement contentions has apparently prompted LS Cloud Storage to dismiss (without prejudice) its first complaint against Cisco and to refile that same complaint—now under a new judge assignment rubric in the same district.

LS Cloud Storage Technologies, LLC has filed its first litigation over the “cached data storage” patents that the plaintiff (acquired by Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC) late last year*) received back in October 2016. The defendants are Alphabet (Google) (6:22-cv-00318), Amazon (6:22-cv-00316), Cisco (6:22-cv-00319), and Microsoft (6:22-cv-00321), sued in separate Western District of Texas complaints targeting storage servers/services (e.g., Amazon Web Services) with overlapping subsets of three such patents.

During the second half of October 2016, RPX took note of eight patent transfers to NPEs. Assignees included two NPEs controlled by Monument Patent Holdings, LLC; a new NPE managed by IP Valuation Partners LLC; and an NPE with apparent ties to Nicolas J. Labbit. Several of the transacted patents have been asserted in litigation filed over the past month.

A Texas NPE formed this past June, Dunti Network Technologies, LLC (DNT), has begun asserting patents from a ten-patent network architecture portfolio issuing to named inventor Rupaka Mahalingaiah. DNT has hit Arista Networks (2:16-cv-01028), Broadcom (2:16-cv-1031), Cisco (2:16-cv-01026), Extreme Networks (2:16-cv-01034), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HP) (2:16-cv-01013), Huawei (2:16-cv-01021), Intel (2:16-cv-01035), and Juniper Networks (2:16-cv-01036) over the past week, accusing the defendants of infringement through the sale of certain switches and associated network solutions (e.g. HP FlexFabric data center switches and HP Intelligent Management Center Enterprise Software Platform, Huawei CE series data center switches and Huawei Next-Generation Network Operating System Versatile Routing Platform, etc.). The new complaints lay out a long history of “pioneering” development work in “real-time computing” by Mahalingaiah, emphasized as a “foreign-born, female, computer engineer” defying odds and overcoming “large-scale industry pushback and skepticism”, all leading to the litigation over the seven patents (6,587,462; 6,643,286; 6,754,214; 6,788,701; 6,804,235; 6,912,196; 7,778,259) now in suit.