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Recently Apple explained to the ITC that many of the standard-essential patents asserted by Samsung against Apple have failed under the scrutiny of litigation, resulting in a finding of non-infringement or invalidity.  Well, Apple can now chalk up another SEP win on the board, although one that has nothing to do with Samsung.  Yesterday, Judge Sue Robinson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware ruled on summary judgment that Apple does not infringe two patents alleged by Golden Bridge Technology to be essential to the 3G W-CDMA wireless telecommunications standard.

Golden Bridge is a noted non-practicing entity whose “primary business is the creation, licensing, and enforcement of Wideband CDMA technology and intellectual property.”  The company is involved in several lawsuits over its allegedly-essential cellular technology, and even brought (and lost) an antitrust case against several mobile device makers a few years back, where it had accused the mobile device companies of excluding Golden Bridge’s technology from the standard-setting process.
Continue Reading Delaware court says Apple does not infringe Golden Bridge W-CDMA patents

The standard-essential patent battle between InterDigital and Chinese handset makers Huawei and ZTE rages on in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware.  Recall that the parties are awaiting an Initial Determination in ITC Inv. No. 337-TA-800, and are also involved in Inv. No. 337-TA-868.  In the companion district court cases to the -868 investigation, Huawei and ZTE attempted to have the Delaware court expedite a determination of FRAND terms for InterDigital’s portfolio, an attempt that was rebuffed by the court.  But now, in motion filed yesterday, InterDigital seeks to have Huawei and ZTE’s FRAND-related claims dismissed altogether.  InterDigital argues that the FRAND counterclaims should have been asserted in an earlier litigation, are not ripe, and merely seek an advisory opinion.  InterDigital also claims that Huawei and ZTE have failed to allege the existence of an enforceable contractual commitment under the applicable law.
Continue Reading InterDigital asks Delaware court to dismiss Huawei, ZTE’s FRAND counterclaims

For the last few months, Samsung and Ericsson have been engaged in a wide-ranging patent infringement skirmish, both in the Eastern District of Texas and in the U.S. International Trade Commission (Inv. Nos. 337-TA-862, 337-TA-866).  Many of the infringement assertions in these cases relate to the 4th-generation Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communications standard, as well as other wireless communications standards promulgated by ETSI and IEEE.  Earlier this week, Samsung filed its Answer and Counterclaims in response to Ericsson’s complaint in case no. 6:12-cv-00894 in the Eastern District of Texas.

Pulling no punches, Samsung not only accuses Ericsson of breaching its FRAND obligations (an accusation it has previously made), but also asserts additional patents against Ericsson — including patents already being asserted in the ITC.  And notably, Samsung also paints Ericsson as a non-practicing entity that is trying to engage in patent hold up — Samsung states that Ericsson “now feels unhinged as a non-practicing entity in the mobile phone market to extort vastly unreasonable and discriminatory license fees,” and that it “seeks to ignore over a decade of licensing history between the companies and to travel down a new road as an NPE extracting irrational sums from Samsung under threat of an ITC exclusion order.”  Rhetoric aside, though, the meat of Samsung’s answer is really about its FRAND-related defenses and infringement counterclaims.


Continue Reading Samsung-Ericsson standard-essential patent battle heats up as Samsung asserts additional patents in E.D. Tex.

Last month, Judge James F. Holderman dismissed various claims brought by Cisco, Motorola Solutions, and NETGEAR against Innovatio IP Ventures, LLC over Innovatio’s vast licensing and litigation campaign relating to the IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard.  These suppliers claimed that Innovatio — in threatening the suppliers’ customers and bringing litigation over standard-essential patents — violated various unfair competition laws, and even the Federal Racketeering and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”).  But the court found that Innovatio’s conduct was protected petitioning activity under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, and that the suppliers did not properly plead that the conduct was a “sham” that would exempt this activity from protection.  Yesterday, the suppliers filed a motion for entry of final judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b), which indicates that the suppliers want to appeal the dismissal of these claims as soon as possible to keep the heat on Innovatio.
Continue Reading Wi-Fi suppliers seek to facilitate quick appeal of dismissal of RICO, unfair competition claims against Innovatio

Last Thursday, March 14, the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet held a hearing titled “Abusive Patent Litigation: The Impact on American Innovation & Jobs, and Potential Solutions.  Those testifying before the subcommittee included representatives from Cisco, SAS, J.C. Penney, Global IP Group, Johnson & Johnson, and Adobe Systems.

The…

ShieldThere’s been much ado in the patent community over the past week over the re-introduction of H.R. 845, the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes Act of 2013 — more commonly known as the SHIELD Act.  This legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), seeks to “protect American tech companies from frivolous patent lawsuits that cost jobs and resources” by  implementing a “loser pays” fee-shifting paradigm for patent infringement cases brought by certain types of non-practicing entities.  (A prior version introduced last year, H.R. 6245, was much more limited in its implementation of fee-shifting.)

While this is a bit off-topic for our blog, we thought this proposed legislation is sufficiently important to our readers that we’d do a brief post on it — especially given the penchant by some NPEs to assert standard-essential patents.  The legislation (at least as it’s currently drafted) has raised a lot of questions and issues and has generated a lot of commentary (both pro and con) from the business and legal communities.  After the jump, we’ll run through a quick summary of the provisions of the SHIELD Act, some first impressions about questions it may raise, and provide some links to a variety of others’ views on the proposed law.Continue Reading The new (and improved?) SHIELD Act

  • ShieldIn a press conference held today, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced an updated version of the SHIELD (Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes) Act.  The aim of this legislation is to decrease the amount of frivolous NPE patent litigation by increasing financial burdens on NPEs.  More on this legislation

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ITC LogoYesterday the U.S. International Trade Commission announced that it has instituted a Section 337 investigation titled Certain Wireless Communications Base Stations and Components Thereof, Inv. No. 337-TA-871.  This investigation is based on a complaint filed on January 24, 2013 by Adaptix, Inc. (a subsidiary of noted publicly-traded non-practicing entity Acacia Research) against Ericsson.  The…

On Friday we posted about the Answers filed by the respondents in In the Matter Certain Wireless Devices with 3G and/or 4G Capabilities and Components Thereof (Inv. No. 337-TA-868) — the case better known as InterDigital’s ITC action against Huawei, Nokia, Samsung, and ZTE.  And we’ve previously discussed how Huawei and ZTE are currently seeking an expedited determination of FRAND terms in Delaware district court, where they also expalined that they would seek to stay the ITC action.  Today, Huawei and ZTE’s motion to stay the ITC investigation hit the docket (it was actually filed on Friday).  Huawei and ZTE seek to halt the ITC investigation pending (1) the outcome of Inv. No. 337-TA-800 (involving the same parties and some of the same patents); and (2) a determination in Delaware of the terms of a FRAND license to InterDigital’s patents.
Continue Reading Huawei, ZTE seek stay of InterDigital 3G/4G ITC investigation