Eastern District of Pennsylvania Judge Joshua D. Wolson, sitting by designation in the District of Delaware case that Stragent, LLC filed against Volvo in March 2022, recently ordered the court clerk to unseal a joint appendix attached to Volvo’s “Motion for Summary Judgment of Noninfringement and No Willful Infringement”. Per a later motion to reseal portions of it, that appendix contains “proprietary technical, commercial, and business information” that “could seriously impair and injure Volvo’s competitive posture in the marketplace”. The unsealing occurred because counsel for Volvo, after being warned that its original request to seal fell short, filed a “recycled brief” that treated sealing from the public “as an afterthought, rather than as a significant request that requires a substantial showing”.

Stragent, LLC has kept its only active litigation campaign alive, filing new suits against three familiar defendants: BMW (1:20-cv-00510), Daimler (Mercedes-Benz) (1:20-cv-00511), and Zhejiang Geely (Volvo) (1:20-cv-00512), all in the District of Delaware. The four asserted patents, generally related to a distributed system for communicating information in an “automotive electronic control unit”, are the more recent members of an eight-patent family, earlier members of which were asserted against the same three defendants in 2016 cases in the Eastern District of Texas, where the court is currently considering a motion to award attorney fees against Stragent. The defendants are targeted, again, over their provision of automobiles with electronic control units (ECUs) that feature AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) technology.

Grus Tech LLC has launched its first litigation campaign, suing LG Electronics (LGE) (4:20-cv-00192) and Samsung (4:20-cv-00190) in the Eastern District of Texas on the same day that Vulpecula, LLC has hit those two defendants (4:20-cv-00191 and 4:20-cv-00189, respectively) in the same district. Each plaintiff asserts patent(s) naming Robert Paul Morris as the sole inventor, with infringement allegations targeting certain of the defendants’ smartphones. These plaintiffs—two of five Texas entities, formed under similar circumstances roughly one month ago, to initiate litigation this past week—are part of a constellation of entities litigating Morris patents.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw petitions for AIA review filed against a variety of prolific litigants in June 2017, including General Patent Corporation, Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), Quarterhill Inc. (f/k/a Wi-LAN Inc.), Realtime Data LLC, Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited, and Xperi Corporation (f/k/a Tessera Holding Corporation). Also in June, the PTAB instituted trial for petitions brought against patents asserted in a variety of sprawling campaigns, including some waged by Acacia Research Corporation, IV, Papst Licensing, Quarterhill, and VirnetX Inc. The Board further issued final decisions throughout June in AIA reviews against patents involved in several notable campaigns, including some waged by Document Security Systems, Inc., Elm 3DS Innovations LLC, Empire IP LLC, and Quarterhill.

Last week, three automakers sued by Stragent LLC in May 2016—BMW, Daimler, and Geely (Volvo)—asked an Eastern District of Texas court on an “emergency” basis to stay the cases against them until their motions to dismiss for improper venue have been decided. The defendants also requested that briefing on those motions be expedited because resolution of the threshold issue of venue will effect whether the defendants will have to meet impending patent disclosure deadlines under local rules. Magistrate Judge K. Nicole Mitchell has granted the emergency motion and set an expedited briefing schedule. The defendants’ motion (e.g. BMW’s motion) for improper venue, partly premised on a TC Heartland theory while that case remained on appeal, was filed on April 13. Four days after the US Supreme Court decision, the defendants filed a notice of supplemental authority. Stragent did not oppose the request for expedited treatment.

During the first half of February, RPX saw the recordation with the USPTO of multiple past assignments of patent assets to various NPEs, including multiple entities affiliated with California attorney Kevin Zilka’s Oso IP, LLC recording the past assignment of patent assets between them, assets originally received from Hard Data Factory (online data scraping), Go2 Media (mobile media), or InstantBull (content aggregation). As usual, several of the other noted transfers involved apparent affiliates of Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), which records made available during this period reveal has received patent assets generally related to three-dimensional data modeling (received from DeltaSphere) and mobile payment platforms (received from Mocapay).

Stragent LLC has revived a litigation campaign that has lain dormant for over two years, filing three nearly identical complaints against automakers BMW (6:16-cv-00446), Daimler (6:16-cv-00447), and Geely (Volvo) (6:16-cv-00448). The two asserted patents (8,209,705; 8,566,843) issued in 2012 and 2013 as continuations of an earlier patent (7,802,263) that Stragent asserted in litigation between February 2011 to November 2013 against suppliers of microcontrollers and/or related software to auto manufacturers. The patents generally relate to communicating information (e.g. software updates) across networks of different type. Stragent’s infringement allegations focus on the defendants’ purported migration to AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture), a standardized system of interfaces between automotive network technologies.

In a final judgment issued this week, a Texas district judge ruled that Intel owes nothing to Stragent in a battle over network processor patents. Further, said Judge Timothy Dyk, Stragent is ordered to pay Intel’s court costs in the nearly three-year-long case. In August 2011 Stragent and SeeSaw Foundation, a non-profit Texas entity, sued Intel for alleged infringement of three patents related to network processors that perform cyclic redundancy checks (6,848,072, 7,028,244, 7,320,102). The complaint stated that SeeSaw was the owner of the patents-in-suit, which were licensed exclusively to Stragent according to the plaintiffs, and accused Intel’s Xeon 7500 processor series with 7500 chipsets of infringement. During litigation, Intel submitted multiple filings and letter briefs to the court maintaining that all of the asserted claims of the patents were invalid. In August 2013 the parties stipulated to limit the asserted claims for trial to only Claims 12 and 16 of ‘072 and Claims 1, 3, and 4 of ‘244. Following a five-day trial, a jury found that Intel had not infringed ‘072 and determined Claims 12 and 16 to be invalid. The jury verdict released on March 14, 2014 is limited to only ‘072, but the final judgment issued by Judge Dyk this week also dismissed with prejudice Stragent’s infringement claims as to ‘244.

Stragent [NPE] filed suit against Elektrobit, Freescale, Fujitsu, Infineon, Mentor Graphics, Renesas, Robert Bosch, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vector over a patent related to data sharing on “bulletin boards”.  3/11, Eastern District of Texas, 6:2011cv00111. Accused products are microcontrollers. This is the first suit in which Stragent has asserted the patent. The assignment to Stragent was recorded in 2008. The patent has 263 claims, all of which contain the term “bulletin board”. “Bulletin board” is not defined in the specification.

Stragent [NPE] filed suit against Elektrobit, Freescale, Fujitsu, Infineon, Mentor Graphics, Renesas, Robert Bosch, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vector over a patent related to microcontrollers and related software.  3/11, Eastern District of Texas, 6:2011cv00111