Northern District of California District Judge Jon S. Tigar has granted a request by Ramey LLP to withdraw from its representation of Lauri Valjakka in his case against Netflix, a request that Netflix opposed. The court found good cause to authorize withdrawal through the nonpayment of fees to Ramey LLP by Valjakka and by third party AiPi, LLC, fees now owed that Ramey LLP claims comes to more than $1.1M. Although permitted to withdraw, Ramey LLP may not have seen the last of this case.

As a prior relationship between apparent funder AiPi, LLC and litigation counsel William P. Ramey III of Ramey LLP hit the skids, Ramey moved to withdraw from his representation of various clients shared between the two, including Lauri Valjakka in his case against Netflix. Netflix has filed an opposition, noting that Valjakka also opposes withdrawal and highlighting the fact that claims in the case “directly implicate Ramey” such that “Ramey’s attempt to evade liability by withdrawing as counsel is inappropriate”. In reply, Ramey argues that because AiPi has stopped payment, Ramey has stopped receiving payment and that “Mr. Valjakka is an individual and can represent himself”.

This past November, District of Colorado Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter ordered William P. Ramey III of Ramey LLP to show cause in writing “why he should not be referred to the Court’s Committee on Conduct for his neglectful behavior in this case, including his failure to appear at a scheduling conference and his failure to serve any discovery”. Ramey’s response was to address five specific pieces of information “relevant to the issues of whether Mr. Ramey and his firm are spread too thin to provide competent representation”. Ramey filed his response—the contents of which have pulled back the curtain on a broad patent monetization operation, including arguably improper legal work, numerous inaccurate certificates of interested parties, and third-party litigation funding lurking in the shadows.

The Northern District of California has tossed a Finnish inventor’s suit against Netflix for lack of standing. On January 8, District Judge Jon S. Tigar held that plaintiff Lauri Valjakka did not own the asserted patent at the time of suit, as he had assigned the preceding application to a company of his that later went bankrupt—applying a Finnish decision that rejected Valjakka’s subsequent attempt to claw back rights to that asset. Judge Tigar also rejected an unusual argument by the plaintiff that urged the court to apply Finnish common law concerning the appropriation of abandoned shipwrecks and piles of discarded leather scraps. The ruling is one of multiple recent setbacks for lead counsel William P. Ramey III, a Texas litigator behind numerous other NPE suits: That very same day, the US Supreme Court both declined to revisit a fee award against another NPE represented by Ramey and rejected his attempt to overturn a ruling that his firm had defaulted on a COVID-19 Payment Protection Program (PPP) loan because he failed to acknowledge a criminal complaint and subsequent arrest in his application.

Thus far in May, inventor Lauri Valjakka has filed suit against Cox (6:22-cv-00497), Charter Communications (6:22-cv-00491), Comcast (6:22-cv-00493), Meta Platforms (6:22-cv-00495), and Zoom (6:22-cv-00496), each in the Western District of Texas. The two patents-in-suit, asserted in overlapping sets, generally relate to transferring data over a network and providing access to restricted content to a user through a digital rights management (DRM) key, with the defendants accused of infringement through the provision of various services and related products: Cox, through the Contour streaming app; Charter, the Spectrum-branded cable, TV, Internet, and phone services; Comcast, the Xfinity-branded cable TV, Internet, and phone services; Meta, the Facebook social media platform; and Zoom, the Zoom communications platform. At issue is the use of and support for certain features related to content retrieval, such as DRM systems and content delivery networks (CDNs).

Named inventor Lauri Valjakka added March 2022 cases against Intertrust Technologies (6:22-cv-00234) and Philips (6:22-cv-00226) in the Western District of Texas. The two patents-in-suit generally relate to transferring data over a network and providingaccess to restricted content to a user through a digital rights management key, with the defendants accused of infringement through the provision of various services: for Intertrust, over the Intertrust Platform and Intertrust PKI service; and for Philips, over the Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform (HSDP). At issue are features related to secure content retrieval.

Inventor Lauri Valjakka has added cases against Alphabet (Google) (6:22-cv-00004), Apple (6:22-cv-00003), and Sony (6:22-cv-00005) to the campaign that he began in September 2021 with suits against Akamai Technologies, Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, and Netflix. The plaintiff’s latest complaints assert two patents generally related to transferring data over a network and providing access to restricted content to a user through a digital rights management key. Targeted are the defendants’ provision of various services; for Google, over Google TV and YouTube; for Apple, over Apple AirPlay and Apple TV+; and for Sony, over Playstation Network and Playstation Now.

Lauri Valjakka has added a case against Microsoft (6:21-cv-01006) to the Western District of Texas campaign that the named inventor began with separate mid-September suits targeting Akamai, Amazon, Cisco, and Netflix. Valjakka asserts a single patent generally related to transferring data over a network, with infringement allegations here focused on Microsoft’s Azure SQL Edge data engine.

Named inventor Lauri Valjakka has filed suit against Akamai (6:21-cv-00942), Amazon (6:21-cv-00945), Cisco (6:21-cv-00944), and Netflix (6:21-cv-00947) over the respective provision of their Edge, CloudFront, Kinetic, and Open Connect distributed computing platforms. A single patent, broadly directed to transferring data over a network, is asserted across the set of Western District of Texas complaints.