Both plaintiff Opticurrent, LLC and defendant Power Integrations have filed Federal Circuit appeals after District Judge Edward M. Chen, in a June decision, trimmed an earlier jury award to Opticurrent from $6.7M to $1.2M. In posttrial briefs, Opticurrent had defended the jury’s identification of a three percent royalty rate and its application to a base that included all products that ended up in the US, even if imported by third parties. The NPE relied on the same theory used in the Carnegie Mellon v. Marvell case, which saw damages awarded on such imported products based on the defendant’s original, domestic design work. The court distinguished the case before it from Carnegie Mellon based on a pivotal jury finding: that Opticurrent did not prove inducement of infringement. As a result, Judge Chen applied a six percent factor to the relevant Power Integrations sales figures to limit the royalty base to direct sales into the US by the defendant.

In May 2019, Palo Alto Networks filed a suit in the Northern District of California seeking declaratory judgments that it does not infringe five network traffic monitoring and packet processing patents held by Packet Intelligence LLC. July saw Packet Intelligence answer that complaint and file affirmative counterclaims, and now the NPE has sued Juniper Networks (3:19-cv-04741) in the same forum, alleging infringement of the same five patents, which were each also targeted with a July 2019 petition for inter partes review (IPR) by campaign defendant Nokia. Meanwhile, NetScout Systems has filed its opening brief in support of its Federal Circuit appeal from a jury verdict and final judgment in the Eastern District of Texas.