Posts Tagged: "Intel"

On March 21, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list denying petitions for writs of certiorari in a pair of patent cases that had worked their way up to the nation’s highest court. In denying these petitions, the Supreme Court turns down Intel Corporation’s challenge to the NHK-Fintiv discretionary denial framework at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), while the Court also dismissed an appeal asking whether a patent infringement case can be determined to be exceptional for purposes of awarding attorney’s fees without a finding that the patent owner engaged in litigation misconduct.

VLSI Technology, originally an integrated circuit manufacturer in the 1990s, is today a non-practicing, patent-owning entity, an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group. VLSI no longer makes or sells any products, but in 2019 it became the owner of U.S. Patent Nos. 7,523,373 and 7,725,759. Each of these patents relates to increasing the power and speed of computer processors. VLSI sued Intel, claiming that almost 1 billion microchips sold by Intel infringed VLSI’s patents. The jury ultimately agreed, entering a verdict of $2.18 billion dollars for VLSI. In simple terms, this amounted to an award of approximately $2 per chip (on a chip that likely is sold for $200 or less per chip based on third-party estimates).

On Tuesday, March 2, a jury verdict  entered into the Western District of Texas awarded $2.175 billion in damages to VLSI Technologies for patent infringement committed by multinational tech firm Intel. The verdict, which includes one of the largest damages amounts ever awarded for patent infringement in a U.S. district court, comes less than two years after VLSI began the lawsuit and arguably marks an important milestone in the effort to address corporate business models employing “efficient infringement” techniques to earn dominant market positions, not as innovators, but as tech implementers.

On Monday, December 9, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Thryv, Inc. v. Click-to-Call Technologies, LP. The case, which has gone through multiple name changes since its original appeal from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), will ask the nation’s highest court whether 35 U.S.C. § 314(d), which states that decisions to institute inter partes review (IPR) proceedings shall not be appealable, permits appeals of PTAB institution decisions based upon 35 U.S.C. § 315(b). Section 315(b) states that IPRs won’t be instituted if the patent owner served the petitioner with a complaint for patent infringement more than one year prior to the petition. To summarize the lower court proceedings in this case, the patent-at-issue was first asserted against Keen Inc. by Inforocket.com in 2001 in a case that was voluntarily dismissed. Click-to-Call acquired the patent and asserted it in 2012 against Ingenio, a company formed through a merger of Keen and Inforocket.com. Ingenio filed for an IPR petition and Click-to-Call challenged it based on the Section 315(b) time-bar and the former suit against Ingenio’s predecessor. The appeal reached the Supreme Court, where it was remanded in June 2016 in light of Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee. Most recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rendered a decision last August where all 12 Federal Circuit judges joined a footnote finding that the Section 315(b) time bar applies even when the earlier infringement action had been voluntarily dismissed without prejudice.

Earlier this summer, Intel announced that some 8,500 patent assets (i.e., issued patents and pending patent applications) would be auctioned. Approximately 6,000 assets related to 3G, 4G, and 5G cellular standards, while 1,700 assets relate to wireless implementation of cellular standards. According to initial reports from IAM, Intel was hoping to sell these patents separately from the smartphone modem business, although they were open to the possibility that a prospective buyer might seek to acquire both the patent assets and Intel’s smartphone modem business. Shortly after the Intel patent assets were announced as available for sale, Intel abruptly took the assets off the market in favor of negotiating with a single interested suitor. Very quickly, news broke that the negotiations with that unidentified suitor were quite advanced, suggesting that the Intel auction announcement was nothing more than a negotiating ploy to get the unidentified suitor back to the table and for the suitor to realize that they could lose the patent assets if they did not play their hand correctly and misidentified the leverage involved in the negotiation. It has recently come to light that the unidentified suitor for the Intel patent assets was none other than Apple, just as IAM has predicted in its initial reporting. So, now we know that Apple will buy the majority of Intel’s modem business, including the patent assets, for $1 billion. 

Last week, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued 39 decisions regarding petitions for inter partes review (IPR) patent validity proceedings, instituting 26. Eight of those proceedings involve major tech firms Samsung, ZTE, Huawei and LG Electronics, all of which won on motions to join previous Google IPRs filed to challenge a pair of Cywee Group patents. Qualcomm also faces a trio of IPRs brought by Intel to challenge the validity of a patent involved in the now-settled legal battle with Apple.

This week in Other Barks & Bites, governments and intellectual property offices around the world celebrate World IP Day; the U.S. Trade Representative releases its most recent Notorious Markets List; TiVo subsidiary Rovi files another patent suit against licensing holdout Comcast; Amazon ramps up program for connecting sellers with lawyers for patent infringement issues; the USPTO seeks public comments on gathering data for SUCCESS Act study; music industry groups submit letter to Copyright Office regarding Mechanical Licensing Collective membership; and weak China data center sales sends Intel stock tumbling by 7.5 percent.

There were 174,317 patent applications filed at the European Patent Office in 2018, according to figures in its Annual Report published today (March 12). That represents an increase of 4.6% on 2017, when there were 166,594 applications. The number of patents granted also increased. The EPO published 127,625 granted patents in 2018, up 21% on 2017. U.S. entities are once again the most prominent applicants at the EPO, accounting for 25% of all applications in 2018. The U.S. is followed by Germany (15%), Japan (13%), France (6%) and China (5%). Applications from Germany grew by 4.7%, which the EPO attributed to an upward trend in the automotive sector and related areas, such as sensors and other measuring devices.

Today marks the return of our Other Barks & Bites feature, which will profile a collection of news headlines from around the IP world and across practice areas every Friday. This week, the patent spat between Apple and Qualcomm heats up at the PTAB; China’s intellectual property court at Beijing shows signs of heightened requirements in trademark appeals for foreign entities; and the European Union delays debate on copyright reforms that would affect major tech firms that aggregate news and videos online.

In devices such as the iPhone, Apple and Intel merely operate on the technological connectivity platform Qualcomm created. In short, what Intel does well doesn’t compete meaningfully with Qualcomm where American 5G leadership is concerned… Apple’s cavalier conduct toward other people’s intellectual property should run into a red, white and blue brick wall at the American border, courtesy of the ITC, in the form of immediately effective exclusion and cease-and-desist orders, keeping iPhone imports that infringe Qualcomm’s patents out of the United States.

According to statistics provided by the USPTO, since the beginning of fiscal year 2012, the Office has received a total of only 1,584 third-party submissions of prior art for consideration by patent examiners. The high water mark occurred in 2016, when the office received a total of 329 third-party prior art submissions. This declined to 266 submissions in 2017 and in fiscal year 2018, the USPTO received a total of only 141 prior art submissions.

Esports is a truly global phenomenon, with some analysts estimating worldwide viewership at approximately 300 million, potentially rising to 500 million by 2020. With so many eyeballs on esports – and with so many of those eyeballs being in a millennial category that is young, affluent, globalized, and technologically-driven, but increasingly challenging for brands to engage with – esports presents an exciting opportunity for sponsors. And, as with any other sport, sponsorship can be a significant revenue generator for rights holders. But, intellectual property rights are complex in esports. When entering into an esports sponsorship arrangement, both rights holders (whether they be players, teams, tournament organizers or games publishers) and sponsors face many of the same issues that the parties to a deal in traditional sports do.

Between 1882 and 1906, this market dominance reportedly brought Standard Oil a total of $838,783,800 in net income. On an annual basis, that would mean that Standard Oil earned nearly $35 million in net income each year, which equals approximately $969 million in 2017 dollars when adjusted for inflation… To some of the tech super giants of today, $1 billion in profits is nothing more than pocket change… If Standard Oil remains the benchmark for what it means to be a monopoly, which many believe it does, it is difficult to understand why U.S. Antitrust regulators are not at least asking very serious questions about the market dominance of the tech super giants and the associated suppression of smaller, truly innovative enterprises.

This license, like many other Free Software licenses, require a legal notice to be given to the recipient when the software is distributed. Alas, it seems like Intel has not done so and as a result the distribution of Minix 3 inside the recent Intel CPUs could be copyright infringement… How can you pirate Free Software? Simple, if you do not comply with the terms and conditions of a Free Software license, then you have no right to distribute the software… Even though people who create Free Software might not necessarily be interested in monetary compensation, they are however usually interested in being named as the author. This is a right which is also part of copyright law in many jurisdictions.

On Monday, October 9th, San Diego, CA-based fabless semiconductor developer Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) announced that it had entered into a licensing agreement with Istanbul, Turkey-based General Mobile, a regional smartphone brand and a partner of the Android One smartphone project developed by Google. The royalty-bearing patent license grants General Mobile the right to develop, manufacture and sell 3G and 4G complete devices which incorporate technologies that are covered by patents in Qualcomm’s portfolio.