Last September, District Judge Gregory B. Williams took the federal Delaware bench, alongside Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly and Judges Richard G. Andrews and Maryellen Noreika, after Judge Leonard P. Stark left to join the Federal Circuit. Delaware has long been one of the busiest venues for patent litigation; it is therefore no surprise that six months into his tenure Judge Williams has now faced and resolved a good number of issues arising from the patent portion of his docket. In that time, with several trials on the horizon, he has issued multiple claim construction rulings; considered and resolved multiple Alice challenges; addressed discovery related to a third-party litigation funder; navigated, at least initially, a potential standing issue arising from the international source of patents that the plaintiff purportedly acquired through a receivership; and refused to enter a default judgment because the plaintiff’s pleading in the complaint “can charitably be described as sparse”, too sparse to establish infringement even upon default.

Its previous cases stayed to permit defendants Apple, HMD Global, and Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) to conduct jurisdictional discovery to determine whether VoiceAge EVS LLC has standing to sue over infringement of the patents that it has asserted, the Fortress Investment Group LLC plaintiff has filed another Delaware complaint, this one against Xiaomi (1:21-cv-00457). The same five patents are at issue, with infringement allegations again targeting over the provision of devices that allegedly use the Enhanced Voice Services (“EVS”) voice and audio codec for voice calls or conferencing, explicitly calling out the Xiaomi Mi 9T smartphone.

VoiceAge EVS LLC, a plaintiff associated with Fortress Investment Group LLC, has added a District of Delaware case against Apple (1:20-cv-01061) to its litigation campaign, begun last fall, over patents purportedly essential to the Enhanced Voice Services (“EVS”) standard. VoiceAge EVS targets various iPhone and iPads (identified in an appendix attached to the complaint) that allegedly use the EVS voice and audio codec for voice calls or conferencing, with the complaint calling out the iPhone 11 explicitly. The plaintiff pleads compliance with its FRAND (fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory) licensing obligations by virtue of offers made to Apple starting in March 2020. Apple joins HMD Global, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), and TCL as defendants in this campaign.

VoiceAge EVS LLC, a Fortress Investment Group LLC plaintiff, has sued Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) (1:20-cv-00810) over the provision of smartphones and tablets supporting the Enhanced Voice Services (“EVS”) voice and audio codec, including the Motorola Moto G7 Power (highlighted in the complaint) and 62 other devices listed in an attached appendix. VoiceAge EVS alleges that the asserted patents are essential to the EVS standard and that it complied with its obligation to license them on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms through offers made to Lenovo starting in February 2020, offers purportedly met with “substantive” silence. The first two cases in this campaign, filed separately against HMD Global and TCL (and multiple subsidiaries), became mired in service issues, and—for the HMD case—a challenge to VoiceAge EVS’s standing to sue.

Yet another set of patents originating with VoiceAge Corporation has now been asserted in NPE litigation, this time in partnership with Fortress Investment Group LLC. In December 2018, VoiceAge announced a “strategic transaction” with Fortress under which the investment firm would license VoiceAge’s portfolio related to the Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) wideband audio codec—with that portfolio assigned to Fortress “affiliate” VoiceAge EVS, LLC. That entity has now asserted five of those patents in litigation, accusing HMD Global (1:19-cv-01945) of infringement through the provision of Nokia-branded smartphones supporting EVS and alleging that the patents-in-suit are essential to that standard. VoiceAge has stated that its transaction with Fortress is designed to “advance . . . [VoiceAge’s] strategic objective of diversifying revenues from [its] IP assets”. This deal follows another partnership between VoiceAge and publicly traded Acacia Research Corporation that appears to have started in 2014, leading to the launch of a litigation campaign that year through Acacia subsidiary Saint Lawrence Communications LLC. That campaign remains active after being revived in August 2018 by licensee EVS Codec Technologies, LLC, with Saint Lawrence later dragged back into the campaign over a standing dispute.