Patent Filings Roundup: Steelmaker’s Trade Show Invention Theft Allegation, Me-Too Joinder Denied Under Section 314, Ericsson and Microsoft Cancel Another Uniloc SEP

As America watches the continued trickle of Presidential election results, the patent docket has stayed heavy, with 111 new district court complaints filed last week, and just 27 petitions (one post grant review (PGR) and 26 inter partes reviews (IPRs), down again). District court patent filings were (as usual) propped up by the aggressive filing patterns of WSOU against another new defendant (this week it was TP-Link’s turn), as well as another surprising flurry of IP Edge suits and a handful of old-fashioned competitor suits, like those between faucet maker Delta Faucet Co. and other market competitors. IP Edge seems poised to end the year the way they started it, filing an amazing number of file-and-settle litigations across districts.

The Nebraska Steel Stealer: In an interesting suit filed this week, 4:20-cv-03127, small precision metalwork company Automated Layout Technologies, LLC filed a willful patent/trademark infringement claim, alleging that Nicholas Donner attended a trade show in 2018, asked about their product, and then set about to both blatantly copy it and go so far as to mislead purchasers via trademarks and metadata into buying from his newly-formed business, Precisions Steel Systems, LLC.  The patent, U.S. 10,576,588, reads on what ALT claims is their small business’s “novel idea for a fully-automated computer numerical control (“CNC”) marking machine for drawing layouts of complex metalworking projects such as commercial handrails.”

Me-Too IPR Joinder Denied Under 314 Discretion: The Board recently denied a “me-too” joinder petition filed by Apple, Inc. regarding a patent asserted against them by Uniloc 2017 LLC, as controlled by Fortress IP.  Apple had filed their own IPR that was denied institution, but another defendant’s IPR was instituted; not being time-barred, Apple then sought to join the instituted IPR, presumably to ensure the co-defendant didn’t settle and drop it. Writing for the panel, APJ Miriam Quinn drew the analogy between concerns raised in General Plastics over potential gamesmanship and found that petitioner should not be allowed to join an instituted proceeding after being denied institution. The IPR, IPR2020-00854, challenged expired patent 6,467,088, originally assigned to Phillips.

Ericsson and Microsoft Beat Back Uniloc and Fortress, Again: Meanwhile, Ericsson and Microsoft challenged and cancelled all of the claims of an oft-asserted Uniloc patent that claimed it read on either ETSI BRAN HiperLAN/2 or IEEE 802.11a standard radio systems.

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