Patent assignments recently made public by the USPTO reveal several notable moves, including the transfer of 175 US assets, generally related to semiconductor fabrication and circuit structures, into curious hands; the transfer of a handful of patents from an individual inventor working in the AI space to a “Patent Licensing and Enforcement” vehicle formed earlier this month; and the transfer of an entire portfolio of connected vehicle patents, after an asset acquisition in the volatile EV space earlier in 2024.

This past week, IPA Technologies Inc. successfully convinced a Delaware jury that Microsoft has infringed three claims from a single patent generally related to speech-based control over electronic resources through the provision of the Cortana digital assistant. The jury returned a verdict indicating that Microsoft failed to prove those claims anticipated by certain prior art (“the WARREN implementation of the RETSINA system”) and awarding $242M in damages. Meanwhile, district court litigation against Alphabet (Google) remains stayed to await IPA’s appeals from adverse final written decisions handed down in remand PTAB proceedings.  

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.

Last week, Quarterhill Inc. (f/k/a Wi-LAN Inc.) announced that Bret Kidd stepped down as the company’s CEO, with Board Chair John Gilberry named interim CEO while a search for a more permanent replacement ramps up. The turnover comes less than a year after Michael Vladescu, the CEO of Quarterhill’s patent licensing arm WiLAN Inc. (WiLAN), died unexpectedly.

Xueshan Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Quarterhill Inc. (f/k/a Wi-LAN Inc.), has filed a second complaint in the Eastern District of Texas against Renesas (2:23-cv-00091). Five patents received from MediaTek are asserted in this complaint, with infringement allegations targeting a wide array of computing products, including converters, memory protection units, microcontrollers, and processors. The fresh litigation from Xueshan Technologies drops as the ice around litigation in one of Quarterhill’s oldest campaigns, dating back to 2007, has thawed.

Polaris Innovations Limited has added an Eastern District of Texas suit against Broadcom (2:22-cv-00347) to its litigation over a portfolio of patents acquired from Infineon in July 2015. The plaintiff, a Quarterhill Inc. subsidiary, asserts five such patents in the new complaint, targeting the provision of various semiconductors, integrated circuits, processors, controllers, and systems-on-chip (SoCs). The case joins active Polaris Innovations litigation against AMD, filed in May 2021, and Xilinx (which AMD acquired in early 2022), filed this past February.

Xueshan Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of publicly traded Quarterhill Inc. (f/k/a Wi-LAN Inc.), has filed its first litigation, suing Renesas Electronics (2:22-cv-00157) over the provision of various integrated circuits, MCUs, MPUs, semiconductors, and SoCs. Asserted in the new Eastern District of Texas complaint are four patents, one generally related to a “user interface display apparatus” that uses texture mapping, another to a “wake-up circuit module” in an electronic device, and the other two, to a “3D graphics accelerator”. One of those last two patents-in-suit has seen prior litigation, although not filed by Quarterhill.

The Federal Circuit has resurrected a trio of Google inter partes reviews (IPRs) against two patents asserted against it by IPA Technologies Inc., a Quarterhill Inc. subsidiary. On May 19, the court issued a precedential decision that faulted the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) for failing to follow the correct standard in determining that a published article was not prior art—a dispute that hinged on the extent of one author’s inventive contributions under the pre-America Invents Act (AIA) first-to-invent system. The decision follows another setback against IPA Technologies last October, when a Delaware judge ruled that Amazon did not infringe the same two patents just before a scheduled trial.

Polaris Innovations Limited, a subsidiary of Wi-LAN Inc., itself controlled by publicly traded Quarterhill Inc., has filed suit in the District of Delaware against Xilinx (1:22-cv-00174) over the provision of field-programmable gate arrays (FGPAs). The plaintiff asserts four patents from the large portfolio that it received from Infineon in July 2015, two of them for the first time. Over the years, Quarterhill has announced settlements with all four of the prior defendants in this campaign, which began back in 2016.

The Federal Circuit has overturned an $85.2M damages award against Apple in its ongoing litigation with Quarterhill Inc. subsidiary Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). On February 4, the appellate court issued a precedential opinion holding that WiLAN’s damages expert in a January 2020 damages retrial used a flawed methodology that was “untethered to the facts of this case”. This decision marks the second time that this same lawsuit has seen the reversal of a significant damages award, following a 2019 ruling from District Judge Dana M. Sabraw that threw out a prior $145.1M award for failure to improperly apportion the infringing features. The Federal Circuit also reversed a partial summary judgment of noninfringement from that first trial, among the other issues decided.