Patent Filings Roundup: EZ Pass Suit; Broken Smartphone Suppliers; Music Plugin Competitor Suits

It was a light week for Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings, with just 18 new petitions, while the district courts remained busy with 71 new complaints. Some patent filings were new additions to existing assertion campaigns like Virtual Immersion [Equitable], Cedar Lane Technologies Inc., or Browse3D; at least six new filings by Viking Technologies, LLC seem to spring from a supplier relationship with smartphone repair services, detailed below.

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Millions of Dollars: In an at-least-seven patent suit filed in the Western District of Texas, Amtech Systems LLC, a subsidiary of Windstream Holdings, LLC and TransCore, sued a major competitor in the “EZ-Pass” market of RFID vehicle automated toll road transponders. Amtech claims that for 80 years it has been a leader in the RFID field of fleet vehicle tracking, with an emphasis on toll road applications (similar to the EZ Pass here in the DC metro area). They have sued direct competitor Kapsch for patent infringement of at least U.S. Patents 8,427,279, 9,262,656, 10,083,329, 7,518,532, 7,772,977, 8,237,565, and 7,548,153. No word yet on whether damages will be paid in two-dollar increments.

Broken Smartphone Screens Spark Litigation: Perhaps not surprisingly, replacing cracked or broken smartphone screens is big business worldwide, representing more than 30 million broken display assemblies replaced, and resulting in a $3.4 billion annual market. According to some recently filed complaints, that market exploded in cost and complexity after 2011, when most handset manufacturers switched to improved but expensive active-matrix light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays. It remained possible but much more difficult to remove the cracked glass portion of such displays without having to replace the entire displays, which was cost-prohibitive for most consumers.

Per complaints, an early operator of device-repair services, Assurant, Inc. approached businessmen Kevin Barnett and Teo Chong Teck, who together formed Viking Technologies Company Limited (Hong Kong) and developed a detailed method of removing and replacing the glass portion of a cracked screen without having to replace the display. Together at a factory based in China, they processed more than 10,000 damaged screens a month; in 2013, Assurant moved on from the business relationship, and after another year, so did other vendors. Now, Viking Technologies, LLC has brought suit against a number of large-scale smartphone repair services, including XPO Logistics, Inc., SquareTrade Inc., Assurant, Inc., Encore Repair Services, LLC, FedEx Supply Chain, Inc., and Teleplan Service Solutions Inc., asserting U.S. Patents 8,888,953 and 10,220,537. The technology ostensibly involves using a precision wire to effectively slice or separate the glass shards from the underlying display without damaging it.

Music to Their Ears: In a curious new competitor-competitor complaint, 14-year-old music software company Mixed-in-Key LLC sued French company Hexachords SAS over their Captain^TM Plugins, audio programs that communicate to produce musical compositions. (More accurately, they sued them over U.S. Patent 10,714,065, which they allege reads on those plugins. Mixed-in-Key alleges that Hexacords runs a website that includes their Orb Producer Suite, which according to third-party public sources bears a striking similarity to the Captain^TM Plugins, going so far as to call them a “knock off.”  The companies exchanged demand letters and had licensing discussions earlier this year; those talks broke down, with Mixed-in-Key alleging that Hexachords never provided a substantive response.

PTAB (18)

District Court (71)