In an Eastern District of Texas case filed by Radian Memory Systems LLC (RMS) against Samsung, the US government, via the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the USPTO, took the unusual step of filing a statement of interest (SOI) in a decision before the court: whether to grant RMS a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s alleged infringement. Injunctions have been difficult for NPE plaintiffs to secure, since the Supreme Court’s 2006 eBay v. MercExchange decision, given the need to show “irreparable harm” without competitive harm between the parties. The SOI asked District Judge Rodney Gilstrap to revisit that standard, arguing that there should be no categorical rule barring NPEs from injunctive relief because, in part, patents are hard to value. Last Friday, however, Judge Gilstrap granted RMS’s motion to withdraw its motion for a preliminary injunction.

NPEs seeking injunctive relief in US district courts have faced an uphill battle over much of the past two decades. Under the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay v. MercExchange, courts must apply a four-factor equitable test when deciding requests for permanent injunctions—including one factor requiring a party to show that it would suffer “irreparable harm” without an injunction. NPEs have historically struggled to clear that threshold, in part because they typically cannot show competitive harm from infringement beyond what damages, as a remedy at law, could compensate. However, the US government, via the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the USPTO, has now pushed the Eastern District of Texas to revisit that standard. The government argues in a June 24 statement of interest—filed in a case from Radian Memory Systems LLC (RMS)—that courts should consider the difficulty of valuing patents and calculating damages for their infringement when weighing irreparable harm, arguing that there should be no categorical rule barring NPEs from injunctive relief on that basis.

Radian Memory Systems LLC (RMS), a plaintiff tied to Fortress Investment Group LLC, has sued Samsung (2:24-cv-01073) over the provision of solid state drives and related products that support Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) technology. In the new Eastern District of Texas complaint, RMS asserts seven memory technology patents developed at Radian Memory Systems Inc. (RMSI), which it characterizes as having “pioneered a new paradigm for managing flash storage media that it called Cooperative Flash Management (‘CFM’)” but as having been “cast out by the industry”.