Patent Filings Roundup: Samsung Seeks Declaratory Judgment against Magentar Entities After Settlement; PTAB 325(d) Discretion Highlighted with Four Denials; District Court Litigation Spikes

A banner week saw the district court roaring back to life with 93 new patent filings and over 50 closed cases, including all of the remanded Section 101 rulings in Realtime Data, LLC. Recall that the Federal Circuit remanded that order to Judge Connolly for including insufficient reasoning under step one and step two of the Alice/Mayo inquiry. The order is still sealed, but as it closes the cases again, one must assume it provides additional reasoning and again cancels Realtime’s patents under 101. That particularly litigious entity had sued 134 defendants, and the case has been up and back, as noted. Funder Alpha Alpha Intellectual Partners launched another massive campaign under the subsidiary Elite Gaming Tech LLC, accusing 18 defendants of infringing some 21 patents, all related to various relatively generic aspects of chips, disk drives, software, and computer devices; defendants include ZTE Corporation, NEC Corporation, Marvell Technology Group Limited, Fujitsu Limited, Lenovo Group Ltd., HP Inc., Hitachi, Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Acer, Inc., Alps Alpine Co., Ltd., ALPS Electric Company Limited, BBK Electronics Corp., Inc., Shenzhen OnePlus Science & Tech.; Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.; MediaTek, Inc.; Giga-Byte Technology Co. [Gigabyte Technology Company Limited]; ASUSTek Computer, Inc.; Asus Global Pte. Ltd.; Pegatron Corporation; ASRock, Inc., and Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.     

Samsung Files Sealed DJ against Magnetar Entities: Be careful who you settle with. The Irish entities, all funded by Magentar Capital LLC and run through Atlantic IP, have been aggressively asserting under a banner of newer entities in recent years—Neodron, Solas OLED, Datascape, Scramoge, Sonrai, Arigna, and possibly XR Communications. Samsung and others settled with Neodron early, for what one must presume was supposed to be global peace in exchange for millions of dollars, only to find themselves targeted by the next two entities down the line. They filed a declaratory judgment action alleging the patents were covered under the earlier agreement. Magentar has been targeting big-name companies, many of whom are members of RPX or who may end up entering into a bulk licensing arrangement, in what seems to have become a profitable strategy for the funders. The sealed complaint is 1:21-cv-07201; the earlier case was reported here.

PTAB More Aggressive in Using 325(d) Prior Art and Arguments Discretion: In two pairs of decisions this week, Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) panels conducted extensive, detailed analyses of prior art and arguments raised previously, whether in prosecution or later before the Board or the reexamination unit, to deny institution on four—decisions emblematic of the use of the express statutory discretion granted to them by Congress in lieu of the sub rosa authority they find in Section 314. Those decisions, IPR2021-00605, -606, and IPR2021-00524, -00527, are reasonably exemplary of the 26 denials thus far this year.

Source: Unified Patents

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