Eastern District of Texas Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap has adopted the report of Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne recommending the denial of a Penney OpCo (d/b/a JCPenney) motion challenging patents asserted by Nearby Systems LLC, an Empire IP LLC plaintiff, against it under Alice. JCPenney argued that the claims of those patents are ineligibly directed to the abstract idea of “combining mapping data into a single map”; Judge Payne disagreed, recommending that “[w]hile the value and novelty of such a configuration is not at issue under §101, the Court is satisfied that it is sufficiently concrete to survive §101”. The court’s order likely dooms a parallel motion filed by another defendant in the campaign, Dollar General, which remains pending before Judges Payne and Gilstrap.

Nearby Systems LLC has filed separate suits against Cinemark (2:23-cv-00384) and Penney OpCo (d/b/a JCPenney) (2:23-cv-00385) in the Eastern District of Texas where the Empire IP LLC plaintiff has been litigating this campaign since June 2022. The new suits follow the dismissal (with prejudice) of a case filed then against Deli Management and stays in separate cases filed against CVS and Rent-a-Center (in light of notices of settlement). The two asserted patents generally relate to “displaying location-based content on a digital map” on a mobile device.