A Federal Circuit panel recently heard oral argument in an appeal from an Eastern District of Texas judgment based on a $300M jury verdict in favor of several subsidiaries of PanOptis Holdings, LLC (collectively, “PanOptis”) against Apple. Press coverage has focused on the panel’s immediate interest in the impact of a ruling from the United Kingdom upping the amount Apple is to pay PanOptis there, to roughly $500M, but a matter at hand, of arguably wider applicability, is the practice of submitting to a jury hearing a multi-patent case a single infringement question, a general verdict practice favored by Eastern District of Texas Judge Rodney Gilstrap, the top judge in patent cases in the US.

In cross-appeals, plaintiff Ollnova Technologies Limited and defendant Generac Holdings (ecobee) each contest aspects of a judgment entered by District Judge Rodney Gilstrap after an Eastern District of Texas jury returned a mixed verdict awarding Ollnova $11.5M in October 2023. One issue up for the Federal Circuit’s consideration is the practice of submitting a question to the jury to resolve the second prong of an Alice analysis: i.e., whether the elements of a challenged claim, taken individually or as an ordered combination, supply an “inventive concept”, enough to save it from invalidation. ecobee faults Judge Gilstrap for not apprising the jury of the abstract idea to which the court had found the challenged claim here directed, and a set of interested nonparties—Forescout Technologies, High Tech Inventors Alliance (HTIA), HP, and SAP—argue in a “friend of the court” brief that Judge Gilstrap’s jury instructions here “lower the standard for patent eligibility and permit a jury to uphold claims where their only inventiveness lies in the patent ineligible subject matter”.

EireOg Innovations Limited, an Atlantic IP Services Limited plaintiff, has sued Amazon (Amazon Web Services (AWS)) (1:25-cv-00552) in the Western District of Texas where the same plaintiff has active cases against Dell, HP, and Oracle. Those suits, each filed in the first half of 2024, have all pushed into claim construction, having recently been assigned to District Judge Alan D. Albright. A separate wing of this campaign is underway before Eastern District of Texas Judge Rodney Gilstrap, against Acer, Cisco, Fortinet, HP Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Lenovo, and Palo Alto Networks. There, the Federal Circuit recently dismissed a petition for a writ of mandamus filed by Lenovo, the appeals court refusing to reverse a denial of Lenovo’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. Across this campaign, EireOg asserts up to five former NXP patents, targeting devices alleged to incorporate certain Intel and/or AMD CPUs.

Last October, an Eastern District of Texas jury returned a mixed verdict awarding Ollnova Technologies Limited $11.5M from defendant Generac Holdings (ecobee) as a “lump sum royalty for the life of the patents” found infringed. A question concerning the second step of the Alice analysis of one of the patents-in-suit was submitted to that jury, which answered in Ollnova’s favor. Through its posttrial motions, ecobee asked Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap to enter judgment as a matter of law in its favor as to that patent. The court has now refused, indicating that while the court ruled that its asserted claims—each considered “as a whole”—are drawn to an abstract idea as a matter of law, the jury considered the elements of those claims—individually or as an ordered combination—and reasonably found that ecobee failed to prove everything there to be merely conventional.

EireOg Innovations Limited, an Atlantic IP Services Limited plaintiff, has added a Western District of Texas case against Oracle (1:24-cv-00697) to the litigation campaign targeting with former NXP patents devices alleged to incorporate certain Intel and/or AMD CPUs. While the Eastern District of Texas cases in this campaign, filed separately against Acer, Cisco, Fortinet, HP Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Lenovo, and Palo Alto Networks, have been assigned to Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap, the West Texas suits—against Dell, HP, and now Oracle—await assignment to a judge.

Earlier this month, District of Delaware Judge Gregory B. Williams denied a motion from BMW to intervene in a case filed by Arigna Technology Limited, a plaintiff operating under the umbrella of Dublin-based monetization firm Atlantic IP Services Limited, against Longford Capital Fund III, LP (“LCF”), an entity controlled by Chicago-based litigation finance firm Longford Capital. The court did so without prejudice, pointing to its decision the day before to stay the case to allow an arbitrator to decide whether Arigna’s claims against Longford should be subjected to arbitration. Meanwhile, District of DC Judge Rudolph Contreras has granted Susman Godfrey L.L.P.’s motion to withdraw from its representation of Arigna in a declaratory judgment action filed by BMW against it there.

A week after suing HP in the Western District of Texas, Eireog Innovations Limited, an Atlantic IP Services Limited plaintiff, has filed an Eastern District of Texas complaint accusing Acer (2:24-cv-00449) of infringing the same three patents. As has been the case since this campaign began in April, Eireog targets the provision of various computing products, including certain categories of laptops and desktops, that incorporate certain Intel and/or AMD CPUs.

Eireog Innovations Limited has sued HP (1:24-cv-00644) in the Western District of Texas over the provision of various computing products, including certain devices broadly categorized as laptops, desktops, and workstations, that incorporate certain Intel and AMD CPUs. The three patents-in-suit, among five asserted across this campaign so far, are broadly directed to interrupt prioritization in virtualized systems sharing hardware resources and cache memory control. Earlier defendants in this campaign include Cisco, Dell, Fortinet, HP Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Lenovo, and Palo Alto Networks.

This past March, RPX reported the transfer to NERA Innovations Limited, an Atlantic IP Services Limited entity, from five others operating under the umbrella of the Dublin-based patent monetization firm. Each of those assignors had previously sued multiple defendants in US federal courts over some of the assets later moved to NERA. Now, IAM has reported that NERA Innovations has put at least one of its received assets to use—but not in the US.

Atlantic IP’s Eireog Innovations Limited has filed a new Eastern District of Texas complaint against HP Enterprise (HPE) (2:24-cv-00279), asserting the same quad of former NXP patents at issue throughout its prior litigation. Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap already presides over previous cases there, filed separately against Cisco, Fortinet, IBM, Lenovo, and Palo Alto Networks. Eireog sued Dell over the same four patents earlier this month, but in the Western District of Texas. Targeted across the campaign, as well as in the new HPE complaint, is the provision of products, ranging from laptops to servers, that incorporate certain AMD and Intel CPUs.