ZyXEL Communications (6:20-cv-00522) has become the sixth defendant in one of two active campaigns waged by STC.UNM, the intellectual property enforcement arm for the Board of Regents of the University of New Mexico (UNM). This campaign concerns several data transmission patents developed by Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), claims terms from which District Judge Alan D. Albright has construed in an April 2020 order. Judge Albright of the Western District of Texas moved into claim construction after denying a convenience transfer of the case, in which Apple is the defendant, to the Northern District of California. Apple has asked the Federal Circuit to reverse that refusal to transfer, arguing that it "continues to challenge the district court's plainly erroneous venue rulings because they have effectively eliminated [convenience] transfers for patent defendants sued in the Waco Division" of the Western District.
STC.UNM accuses ZyXEL of infringing the three asserted patents (8,249,204; 8,265,096; 8,565,326) through the provision of "communications equipment, networking devices, wireless receivers, extenders, adapters, and mesh systems" that support the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard. Judge Albright indicated in his April claim construction order that the court intended to enter a memorandum in support of its rulings "shortly"; the memo has not yet been added to the docket. (On June 8, a second order purporting to construe disputed terms discussed at a May 15, 2020 hearing was entered on the Apple docket, with another note that a supportive memorandum is to issue "shortly". The terms construed appear in a patent (6,467,088) in active assertion by Fortress Investment Group LLC's Uniloc 2017 LLC against Apple in the same district (6:19-cv-00532), suggesting a docketing error.)
ITRI is a non-profit Taiwanese research and development foundation, established in 1973, funded by a combination of government and industry sources. It touts a long history of incubating tech companies that spinoff and employees who likewise launch their executive and entrepreneurial careers with tech firms from the foundation. USPTO records indicate that ITRI holds thousands of US patent assets, most related to mobile communications, and over the years, it has initiated roughly a dozen litigation campaigns, typically suing LG, LG Electronics (LGE), and/or Samsung. Indeed, ITRI asserted the three patents at issue here (together with a fourth patent) in a cased filed and dismissed (in light of a settlement) in 2015 against LGE.
An entity called Sino Matrix Technology, Inc., the website for which is no longer active, acquired the patents in March 2018 and assigned them to STC.UNM that September. A cached version of the Sino Matrix website indicates that the company once "focus[ed] on the design, manufacture, test and sell of . . . Mixed-signal ICs" and that its "main product lines" were related to "Wireless Communication, RFID and ASIC". Chi-Ping Chang signed for Sino Matrix as its president in the assignment to STC.UNM. Chang appears to have been a department manager in "Digital Electrical Design" with ITRI's Electronics Research and Service Organization (ERSO), which purportedly helped research engineers become "technopreneurs".
The '204 patent generally relates to providing feedback to a base station by a mobile device by estimating a channel state information (CSI) value: by calculating channel responses and selecting channel taps, compressing the results, and sending the compressed result to the base station. Judge Albright adopted two agreed-upon constructions of Apple and STC.UNM, for "a plurality of channel taps" and "channel responses", further ruling that each preamble for the asserted claims is limiting.
The '096 patent broadly concerns building a packet frame for transmission, with Judge Albright adopting agreed-upon constructions for "at least one of [.] and [.]" and "symbol period", again ruling that each preamble is limiting, and resolving disputes over the constructions for six additional terms, several of which the court settled on a plain and ordinary meaning that the order then lays out: "frame structure" ("a single structure comprising one or more frames, wherein each frame may have one or more subframes"); "symbol" (plain and ordinary meaning: "a transmissible unit of information"); "pilot symbols that are denser than" ("more pilot symbols per unit time than, wherein a unit time is the symbol period of the first communication system"); "communication system" (plain and ordinary meaning: "a combination of hardware and software that transmits and receives data according to one or more communications standards"); "wherein the first communication system's symbols and the second communication system's symbols co-exist in one transmission scheme" (plain and ordinary meaning); "data"/"non-data" (plain and ordinary meaning); and "support higher mobility than" ("support higher relative velocity between a transmitter and a receiver than"). As to that last term, Judge Albright rejected a challenge from Apple that the term is indefinite.
The '326 patent generally pertains to transmitting data as coded bits by performing a "circular shift" with a length related to a modulation order and number of transmissions and then transmitting the circularly shifted bits. The court adopted one construction by agreement, for "with a variable length related to a modulation order and a number of transmissions", ruled that each preamble is again limiting, and construing "circular shift" to mean "an operation that moves a sequence of bits from one end of an ordered group of bits to the other end".
STC.UNM began this campaign by suing TP-Link in April 2019, adding a suit against Apple in July, and suits against ASUSTek and D-Link in February 2020. Earlier in June, the plaintiff hit Dell with a lawsuit, also asserting the same three patents. The Apple case raced ahead of the cases filed before the one against it because the TP-Link suit has become bogged down in issues surrounding service on a foreign entity, an issue the same court has considered in STC.UNM's second April 2019 campaign, concerning homegrown semiconductor fabrication patents. STC.UNM has also filed motions to effect alternative service on ASUSTek and D-Link.
Judge Albright denied Apple's motion to transfer and then moved into claim construction. In support of its request for a writ of mandamus from the Federal Circuit (2020-0127) reversing Judge Albright's denial of the transfer motion, Apple argues that "[n]either 'the convenience of parties and witnesses' nor 'the interest of justice' links this litigation to Texas" as a "New Mexico plaintiff is suing a California defendant based on patents developed in Taiwan and technology developed in California". Apple contends that STC.UNM's "real theory" is that because it has a "significant presence" in Austin, the company can "never obtain transfer out of the Western District of Texas". While denying Apple's request to move the case to California, Judge Albright granted a "transfer" to the Austin Division of the district (from the Waco Division) while continuing to preside over the litigation. 6/12, Western District of Texas.
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