The past two weeks have seen juries in two popular patent venues hand down infringement verdicts. On October 16, a Delaware jury found that smartphone maker HTC infringed two cellular networking patents asserted against it by 3G Licensing S.A. and awarded $9M in damages, just the latest chapter in a slimmed-down case that has survived a trip to the Federal Circuit and back. The week before, a jury in the Western District of Texas issued a $240M verdict for StreamScale, Inc. against Cloudera, finding that the company infringed three data protection patents held by the inventor-controlled plaintiff.

Delaware plaintiff NexGen Control Systems LLC has filed its first litigation, suing NXP Semiconductors in two separate Eastern District of Texas complaints, one targeting the provision of various automobile computing products, including the Peripheral Sensor Interface 5 (PSI5) system, FXOS8700CQ series devices, and the MC33789 Airbag System Basis Chip and related inertial sensors (5:23-cv-00022); and the other targeting the provision of various devices such as chipsets, controllers, drivers, and integrated circuits (5:23-cv-00025). All six patents now in suit share a development history, at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (MELCO), multiple assigned portfolios of which have spawned recent litigation.

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.

Last week, RPX pointed readers to a string of recent NPE campaigns asserting patents received from Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (MELCO). Now, more such patents have appeared in litigation, this time brought by MELCO itself—with coplaintiff Sisvel International S.A.—against TCL (8:22-cv-01073). In a complaint filed on May 27 in the Central District of California, the plaintiffs target certain mobile devices and data terminals capable of communicating over LTE wireless communications networks within the US.

PanOptis Patent Management, LLC; Optis Cellular Technology, LLC; Unwired Planet, LLC; and Unwired Planet International Limited (collectively, PanOptis) have sued Ford (2:22-cv-00133) in the Eastern District of Texas, asserting a group of former Ericsson or Panasonic patents and targeting connected vehicles alleged to communicate according to the 4G/LTE cellular network standard. PanOptis appears to be the latest to join a line of Avanci, LLC licensors taking aim at Ford.

On the heels of an Alice setback in that District of Delaware cases that it filed in June 2019, Aegis 11 S.A., an affiliate of Sisvel International S.A. (d/b/a Sisvel Group), has added Northern District of Georgia suits against Funai (1:20-cv-03890) and Hisense (1:20-cv-03891) to the campaign. Last year, Aegis 11 hit Belkin, CommScope (ARRIS, Ruckus Wireless), NETGEAR, Roku, and TCL (TTE Technology) with separate cases targeting devices compatible with the 802.11ac wireless networking standard. The defendants challenged one of the three patents-in-suit as patent-ineligibly directed to the abstract idea of “generating and using random numbers for the purpose of mutual authentication”. Earlier this month, District Judge Richard G. Andrews agreed with a magistrate recommendation that that patent be invalidated. Now, Aegis 11 has asserted the remaining two patents in its Georgia complaints, adding a third, all of them originally sourced from LG Electronics (LGE). The NPE has also moved to amend its June 2019 complaints to assert the new patent.

Earlier this year, an assignment from Shanghai Langbo Communication Technology—a self-described “IP-centric start-up company” focused on “4G and 5G SEP creation”—to Sisvel International S.A. came to light. Now, a second assignment by Langbo has surfaced, this time to Chris Dubuc’s new monetization firm Harfang IP Investment Corp (d/b/a Harfang IP), suggesting that the research lab, founded in 2013, is exploring options for monetizing its “5G patents”.

The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) has issued a long-awaited decision on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) patent licensing, ruling in favor of patent pool administrator Sisvel International S.A. earlier this month in a long-running standard essential patent (SEP) dispute with Haier over mobile devices. The Sisvel v. Haier decision reportedly sets a higher bar for accused infringers hoping to show that their prior licensing behavior had been FRAND-compliant. It is also the first FRAND ruling by Germany’s highest patent court since the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU’s) 2015 decision in Huawei v. ZTE, which established a framework for injunctive relief in SEP litigation.

NPE litigation in the Automotive market sector during the first four months of 2020 was up nearly threefold from the same time period last year. Most recently, 21ST CENTURY GARAGE LLC and Sisvel International S.A. (d/b/a Sisvel Group) have taken aim at companies operating in the sector, but the year so far has seen new campaigns launched by plaintiffs ranging from relatively recent entrants to patent monetization (e.g., Quartz Auto Technologies, LLC) to established players (e.g., Conversant Wireless Licensing, S.à.r.l.), as well as additional cases filed in existing campaigns waged by inventor-controlled Omega Patents, L.L.C. and frequent plaintiff Leigh M. Rothschild. From wireless connectivity to more traditional automotive technologies, something about 2020 has drawn more litigation to the sector.

Earlier this month, Sisvel International S.A. (d/b/a Sisvel Group) added a District of Delaware case against Dell to the networking campaign that it began in that district in June with suits against six other defendants. The original complaints in the June cases asserted five former Nokia patents, but subsequent amended complaints added accusations as to seven former BlackBerry patents (or a subset of those patents) to all prior complaints except the BLU Products complaint. Dell was hit with all 12 patents at once, as is the situation with Sisvel’s new suit against ZTE (3:19-cv-01694), filed in the Northern District of Texas by Sisvel and a sister subsidiary, 3G Licensing S.A., to which Sisvel pleads that it assigned the former BlackBerry patents on July 11, 2019. ZTE is accused of infringement through the provision of the Axon, Blade, Grand, and Nubia series smartphones.