Federal Circ mulls ‘standing’ question in licensing disputes
The appeal concerns patent infringement lawsuits against Apple, Google and Motorola | Decision could affect licensing and funding deals.
The question of standing at the heart of disputes between Uniloc and Motorola, Apple and Google has come under scrutiny at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Yesterday, September 6, the court queried whether a patent owner who enables the sub-licensing of IP is still able to file proceedings for infringement over the said patents.
According to US law, standing limits participation in lawsuits and asks whether the plaintiff bringing a lawsuit has enough cause to ‘stand’ before the court.
Back in 2017, Hewlett Packard assigned several patents to Uniloc Luxembourg, which in turn licensed the patents to Uniloc US, and the duo proceeded to sue Apple for infringement.
In 2018, Uniloc also sued Motorola at the District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging that the smartphone maker’s Android devices infringed its US patent number 6,161,134.
Fortress agreed to loan Uniloc $26 million to fund its litigation, but when the patent entity defaulted on the loan, it fell foul of a contractual clause that held that it must transfer patent rights to Fortress.
District courts in Delaware and Northern California later held that Uniloc had rescinded its exclusionary rights to the patents and did not have the ‘standing’ to sue.
These rulings subsequently affected other Uniloc cases against Google, when district Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Northern California referred to these decisions and dismissed 11 cases against the company for ‘lack of standing’.
Uniloc has now argued to the Federal Circuit that ‘standing’ shouldn’t be dependent“ on conditional (but never-exercised) right to sub-license the patent.
The court of appeal’s ruling is expected to have significant ramifications for cases and disputes involving licensing deals and litigation funding.
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