At the start of June, Teleputers, LLC filed its first patent litigation, suing Marvell Semiconductor in the Western District of Texas over two patents naming as one of its inventors Ruby B. Lee, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University. The plaintiff finished the month accusing Renesas ( 6:20-cv-00599) of infringing the same two patents, in a second West Texas complaint targeting certain systems-on-chip (SoCs) based on the ARM NEON architectures. Teleputers also hit Oracle ( 6:20-cv-00600) there, over a third Lee patent, also generally related to instructions in a programmable processor, targeting the Oracle Solaris 11 Operating System (including Oracle SPARC and Oracle x86 Servers shipped with Oracle Solaris 11).

As noted, the two patents asserted against Marvell and Renesas (6,952,478; 7,092,526) and the sole patent at issue in the Oracle complaint (7,174,014) all name Lee as an inventor, the former two with Xiao Yang and the latter with Zhijie Shi. The plaintiff pleads that each defendant is on notice as of the date of the original complaint of the “Teleputers Patents”, which the document defines to include the ‘478, ‘526, and ‘014 patents together with two others (6,922,472; 7,519,795), also currently assigned to Teleputers and also naming Lee as an inventor. In the Oracle complaint, Teleputers pleads that Oracle has “have taken reference from Intel's 64 and IA-32 architecture instruction set for the permutation instructions in Solaris”.

Further information about Teleputers, Lee, and their patents can be found at “Teleputers Tags Marvell in New Semiconductor Suit over Princeton Professor's Patents” (June 2020). Each of the Teleputers cases has been assigned to District Judge Alan D. Albright in the Western District of Texas. A former patent litigator himself, Judge Albright has recently expressed a jaundiced view toward the application of claim preclusion to any patent eligibility analysis (see here), a reluctance to dispose of cases on early Alice challenges at all (see here), and an apparent hesitance to transfer cases out of his court on convenience grounds (see here). 6/29, Western District of Texas.

Originally published 13 July, 2020

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