Patent Filings Roundup: Nokia Takes on Amazon, New Fintiv Denial, Semiconductor Settlement

It was another slow week for patent filings at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and a typical week in district courts, with 52 district court complaints filed and 22 new PTAB petitions. There was a new discretionary denial, a bunch of litigation-provoked high-profile PTAB challenges, and some notable new litigations.

There was another Fintiv discretionary denial this week: here, a Chinese patent owner, Ningde Amperex Technology Ltd., benefited from the Board’s discretionary denial rules in a petition brought by another Chinese battery company. The case, IPR2023-00585, leaves unaddressed the questions raised about the validity of U.S. Patent 11329352. The patent holder company claims to be the world’s leading supplier of lithium-ion batteries.

The biggest story of the week was Nokia opening a massive multinational assertion campaign against Amazon on video codec patents, including an International Trade Commission (ITC) case, district court litigation, and a Unified Patent Court (UPC) proceeding. The timing is curious, given the launch of the Avanci Video pool; video codec licensing had appeared to be settling down with Access Advance offering a license for at least a bare majority of the HEVC patent landscape. With the injection of uncertainty with the launch of Avanci Video, which is run by Marconi Group and is basically a relaunching of the failed Velos Media assertion entities (the Velos Media patents are in the Avanci Video pool), it’s worth noting that Nokia is not in either Avanci Video (yet) or Access Advance, further complicating licensing in this space. Avanci Video also proposes to license encoding content companies, though they are not yet disclosing publicly how they suggest rates would apply.

Cirrus Logic Inc. filed a tranche of IPRs against Greenthread LLC; cybersecurity company Crowdstrike filed a tranche of Quest-controlled patents asserted under Taasera Licensing LLC; and Micron had a tranche of IPRs instituted against aggressive assertor Netlist, a company with close ties and funding from Fortress IP. That company is locked in a second round of litigation against Samsung after a busted settlement agreement; that follow-on case was thrown for a loop last week when the appellate court reversed a case that argued Samsung was in breach, suggesting the whole case steaming toward trial might be thrown out.

Buried in the reports, it appears that the world’s biggest semiconductor, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., has settled with Daedalus Prime LLC, dismissing pending IPRs and related suits based on an undisclosed settlement. These appear to be an old Intel portfolio run out of Ed Gomez’s Daedalus Group, LLC.

OptiMorphix Inc. has asserted at least 18 former Citrix patents against VMWare, Oracle, Amazon, and Alphabet; the patents concern data transfers and are asserted against cloud storage and transmission companies; the patents appear to be associated with ByteMobile, which was acquired by Citrix in 2012 to compete on cloud services.

Curiously, Missed Call LLC, a Pueblo Nuevo/Bill Ramey entity, has apparently made a mistake and brought a new suit in the Western District of Texas (Austin division)—despite the fact that there’s a pending Delaware case on the same patent, by the same plaintiff, that is currently stayed in Delaware.

To back up, the disclosure in Delaware revealed that a Panamanian, Hernan Arturo Perez Torrijos, owned Missed Call, but that Ramey LLP was a provider of nonrecourse funding. Judge Connolly ordered the appearance of William Ramey, III, David Ghordanpoor, and Carlos Gorrichategui; that case was stayed, but then Missed Call refiled a new case in the Western District of Texas, before Judge Pittman in Austin, listing Ramey LLP and Missed Call as interested parties. Judge Pittman recently chided Mr. Ramey in an unrelated case, 1:22-cv-01167, LS Cloud Storage Technologies v. Amazon, for his excuses related to repeatedly missing deadlines. In Pittman’s words, “far more concerning” was Mr. Ramey’s “repeated use of the same excuse for missed deadlines across cases,” including blaming his docketing software, blaming a litigation listserv notification, and blaming his staff.

It will be interesting to see how the case plays out, but one would assume that filing a new complaint in a different district would not lead to avoiding the attendant disclosure.

Links to the cases discussed above and more are available in the Weekly UP, which can be found here.

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