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.