Litigation

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SanDisk brought suit against Round Rock Research in the District of Delaware last week, alleging that the patent assertion entity’s acquisition and enforcement of standard essential patents previously held by Micron Technology has violated federal and state antitrust laws and breached contractual commitments to license the patents on RAND terms. The action, Sandisk Corporation v.

Well that didn’t take long — yesterday the Ninth Circuit dismissed LSI’s appeal from Judge Whyte’s preliminary injunction that enjoined LSI from seeking to enforce any exclusion order entered by the ITC on the standard essential patents at issue in the district court litigation before LSI first offered a RAND license to Realtek.  Our March…

Yesterday Judge Whyte entered a post-trial scheduling order setting briefing and hearing dates for post-trial motions as well as Realtek’s request to permanently enjoin LSI “from enforcing, or seeking to enforce, any exclusion order or injunction that Defendants [LSI] might obtain with regard with regard to the ‘958 and ‘856 patents [LSI’s WiFi SEPs at…

Judge Koh recently granted Apple and Samsung’s stipulated request to dismiss without prejudice Samsung’s claims that Apple infringes certain declared-standard essential patents (SEPs) and Apple’s related FRAND defenses and counterclaims.  There is no indication in the filing that the parties are negotiating a settlement as to those SEPs, though that’s always a possibility.  The stipulation…

Yesterday the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) issued a Notice that it was terminating the investigation of whether certain LSI 802.11 and H.264 alleged standard essential patents were infringed by Realtek and others given various circumstances that mooted the investigation as to most patents and a finding of no liability for the remaining patent.  In…

Yesterday, in two separate precedential decisions on mandamus, the Federal Circuit refused to overturn the district courts’ decisions not to transfer patent assertion entity cases to the defendants’ home forum: In re Apple, Misc. 13-156 (mandamus from E.D. Tex.) and In re Barnes Noble, Misc. 13-162 (mandamus from W.D. Tenn.).  Both mandamus orders were…

Yesterday, the jury in the Realtek v. LSI case before Judge Whyte returned a verdict finding that a RAND royalty for LSI’s two patents alleged essential to IEEE 802.11 WiFi standard would total about 0.19% of the total sales prices of Realtek’s WiFi chips (0.12% for one patent plus 0.07% for the other).  This RAND…

As a reminder that standard essential patent issues go beyond information technology, last week SawStop LLC sued manufacturers of table saws alleging that they conspired to convince Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. (“UL”) to not adopt SawStop’s patented table saw safety technology into UL standard 987 (Stationary and Fixed Electric Tools) and to adopt a different technology…

Back in August, we reported on a series of four patent suits filed in the Southern District of Florida by a group of MPEG LA MPEG-2 patent-pool-licensors targeting television manufacturers Craig Electronics, Curtis International, Motorola, and ViewSonic.  The litigation now appears to be settled with respect to all parties except for ViewSonic, whose case was…