Patent Filings Roundup: Qualcomm Dragged into Waco by Magentar on IoT Chips; Board Skips Merits in Denial

Happy belated Valentine’s Day; there were 74 district court terminations last week (mostly file-and-settle flotsam); 36 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings (bolsted by Qualcomm indemnification filings and some medical device action); and 56 district court patent filings this week, in a mid-month lull before certain entities have to hit their end-of-month quota; let’s get to it.

Qualcomm’s Magnetar litigation-funding problem grows worse, lands in Waco: The Magnetar-capital funded Atlantic IP entities have been bold from the start, striking out on analog chips and circuits and technology related to—but often not standardized in—mobile and personal devices.  They’ve brought major litigation now against top Fortune-500 companies for years, with no signs of stopping.  One of their bigger campaigns, Arigna, necessarily targets chips themselves; so it’s no surprise that Qualcomm, who has indemnification obligations on many of the chips they sell in this space, is being forced into court as Magentar chases them around the globe.  In the most recent round, Arigna, an entity that first targeted Infineon chips in automotive infotainment systems, has moved on the Qualcomm chips in cell phones, suing seven plaintiff device manufacturers—Alphabet, Apple, Lenovo, Microsoft, OnePlus, Samsung, and TCL—all in the a single case in the Western District of Texas on Qualcomm’s QET4100 and QET5100-series envelope tracking modules.

What’s interesting about this and many of Magnetar’s suits is they have settled on a strategy that avoids more heavily-licensed chipsets and standards, but nonetheless targets circuits or features incorporated into most devices—here, IoT modules related to tracking.  Other suits have targeted Qi wireless chargers, NFC communications, and other various “satellite” features of mobile devices. I’d expect Qualcomm to step in and challenge the patents at the Board, as they did this week against FedEx in an unrelated dispute.

In Discretionary Denial, Board Punts on Merits Entirely:  Call it a way to wrap up an institution decision, a time-saver, or what have you, but in an interesting 314(d) procedural denial, the Board marched through analysis of some, but not all, of the presented grounds on the merits.  Once they had analyzed what they felt was a sufficient number of the grounds, they concluded that, given they did not think most of the combinations had merit, they could “assum[e], without deciding, that … Petitioner at best could success in two of fourteen challenged claims and in two of three grounds,” and so exercised their 314(d) escape hatch to deny institution without considering the merits there. Interesting interpretation of their statutory mandate.  See Lumentis Ltd. v. BTL Healthcare Technologies A.S., IPR2021-01275, on U.S. Patent 10,632,321.