Lenovo (United States) Inc. (1:24-cv-01126), a US subsidiary of Lenovo, has filed suit against Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc. (UCT) in the District of Delaware. The Lenovo sub seeks declaratory judgments (DJs) of noninfringement of the eight patents that UCT asserted against Lenovo (the Hong Kong parent) in a Eastern District of Texas complaint filed in late 2023. UCT also sued Dell and HP last year. Threshold issues have dominated each case: against Dell, the production of documents created by Stout Capital in connection with a valuation of the sale of Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN)’s monetization business; against HP, a convenience transfer to the Northern District of California (which occurred this past summer); and against Lenovo, the exercise of personal jurisdiction over the parent entity.

Since August 2014, Collabo Innovations, Inc., a Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) subsidiary, has been litigating a portfolio of patents received in 2013 from Panasonic, doing so across three campaigns as a formal matter. In February of this year, the last active case, against AMD in the Western District of Texas, was dismissed with prejudice after the parties noticed a resolution. Now, Collabo has sued Qualcomm (6:24-cv-00472) over the same single patent, generally related to a conserving power in a microcontroller. The accused products include “Qualcomm processors such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Processor APQ8064 and other processors and platforms offered and sold by Qualcomm that support low power state with power collapse (and similar functionality)”.

Patent assignments recently made public by the USPTO reveal several notable moves, including the transfer of 175 US assets, generally related to semiconductor fabrication and circuit structures, into curious hands; the transfer of a handful of patents from an individual inventor working in the AI space to a “Patent Licensing and Enforcement” vehicle formed earlier this month; and the transfer of an entire portfolio of connected vehicle patents, after an asset acquisition in the volatile EV space earlier in 2024.

Earlier this year, Northern District of California Judge Jon S. Tigar rejected an unusual argument from plaintiff Lauri Valjakka urging the court to apply Finnish common law concerning the appropriation of abandoned shipwrecks and piles of discarded leather scraps to save his case. Then, Eastern District of Texas Judge Rodney Gilstrap held that French law, which follows “the privity rule”, applies to the contract giving rise to a FRAND obligation; and that Samsung provided insufficient evidence under French law that plaintiff G+ Communications LLC could be considered the alter ego of ZTE. For the latest brush with foreign law in domestic patent cases it is back to Judge Gilstrap, who just denied a motion to dismiss on a license defense that brushed up against a ruling under German law.

Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc. (UCT) has followed up its late September 2023 cases filed separately against HP in the Western District of Texas and Lenovo in the Eastern District of Texas with a new suit against Dell (1:23-cv-01506), in the former venue. Received in a portfolio from Lattice Semiconductor in November 2021, the same eight patents are asserted against Dell, with infringement allegations targeting the provision of a wide array of devices, including laptops, desktops, monitors, docking stations, and adapters, that support various versions and features of the DisplayPort and USB standards.

Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc. (UCT) has filed its first litigation, over patents from a portfolio received from Lattice Semiconductor in November 2021. The plaintiff accuses HP (1:23-cv-01177) and Lenovo (2:23-cv-00449) of infringing the same eight patents via alleged support for various standards associated with DisplayPort and USB (e.g., USB 3.0, 4.0, and -C) by a wide array of devices, including adapters, computers, docking stations, laptops, and/or monitors.

Eridanus Technologies, Inc. (ETI) received five patents from STMicroelectronics back in February 2015, but the Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN) subsidiary filed what appears to be its first suit from that received portfolio just this past week. ETI accuses AMD (1:23-cv-01036) of infringing two of those patents—one generally related to reducing current leakage in logic devices; the other, to managing power supply to a system-on-chip (SoC)—through the provision of various computer processors (i.e., APUs and CPUs). The case comes after big changes were announced at WiLAN earlier this summer.

The Federal Circuit has overturned an $85.2M damages award against Apple in its ongoing litigation with Quarterhill Inc. subsidiary Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). On February 4, the appellate court issued a precedential opinion holding that WiLAN’s damages expert in a January 2020 damages retrial used a flawed methodology that was “untethered to the facts of this case”. This decision marks the second time that this same lawsuit has seen the reversal of a significant damages award, following a 2019 ruling from District Judge Dana M. Sabraw that threw out a prior $145.1M award for failure to improperly apportion the infringing features. The Federal Circuit also reversed a partial summary judgment of noninfringement from that first trial, among the other issues decided.

The Federal Circuit has just upheld the dismissal of two Quarterhill Inc. smart TV cases against Sharp and Vizio after rejecting evidence central to its infringement claims as inadmissible. In an April 6 precedential decision (2020-1041), the appellate court agreed with Delaware District Judge Leonard Stark that plaintiff Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN), Quarterhill’s licensing arm, could not rely on certain documents obtained through litigation: an alleged printout of certain source code for the video chipsets at issue and related explanatory declarations. WiLAN had offered that evidence in lieu of the source code itself, which the NPE had been unable to procure from the chipsets’ third-party manufacturers through discovery.

Quarterhill Inc. released its Q4 and 2020 financial results this week, reporting decreased year-over-year patent licensing revenue but several new license agreements as well as multiple acquisitions of large operating company portfolios. The company’s slower fourth quarter followed a surge in licensing revenue in Q3, which management characterized at the time as Quarterhill’s “best quarter” in three years.