- within Intellectual Property, Litigation and Mediation & Arbitration topic(s)
Comcast (3:25-cv-08231) has filed a complaint in the Northern District of California seeking declaratory judgments of noninfringement and invalidity of five patents held by Acceleration Bay, LLC. Comcast highlights the more than six years between Acceleration Bay's first letter about these patents, sent in March 2019, and an August 2025 "follow-up" email. In the latter, Acceleration Bay represents that over this time, "[t]wo separate juries (AWS and Activision) found infringement and confirmed a 12% royalty rate" and that Comcast's alleged damages exposure ranges from "the hundreds of millions of dollars" to "the billions, before considering willfulness".
In September 2024, a Delaware jury returned a verdict against Amazon (Amazon Web Services), awarding Acceleration Bay, LLC $30.5M in damages for the infringement of two patent claims through the provision of its CloudFront (accounting for $29.5M of the total) and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) products/services. The jury found the infringement willful as to CloudFront only, as District Judge Richard G. Andrews restricted pretrial any potential enhancement to the amount tied to that product. Posttrial briefs have gone in, but the court has yet to rule.
More particularly, that jury found claim 6 of the 6,732,147 patent and claim 12 of the 6,714,966 patent infringed through the provision of both CloudFront and VPC, by the former product willfully. The court's restriction of willfulness to CloudFront stems from a pretrial ruling that a March 13, 2019 letter could only put Amazon on notice of alleged infringement of that product/service with respect to four (the '147 and '966 patents, as well as the 6,829,634 and 6,910,069 patents) of the five (6,701,344) originally asserted patents in this case. Acceleration Bay apparently dropped the other three patents—and focused the set of accused products to just the two—before trial.
Comcast's new complaint concerns the '966, '147, '634, '069, and 6,920,497 patents. The August 2025 email from Acceleration Bay anchors the "low-end" exposure estimate with Comcast's provision of its Peacock and Xfinity Stream services, characterizing the "high end" as "reflecting Comcast's broadband network and system wide distribution model". In its complaint, Comcast notes two noninfringement dismissals, one against Take-Two Interactive Software (including of the '966, '147, '069, and '497 patents) in 2020 and one against Electronic Arts (including of the '966, '147, '634, and '497 patents) before that.
Acceleration Bay's principal is Joseph ("Joe") Ward. He signed the August 2025 email to Comcast. Ward has billed Acceleration Bay, as an "incubator", "innovator", "investor", and "ventures corporation that creates patent-backed ventures". As RPX's past reporting details, litigation in this campaign, particularly in a case against Activision Blizzard (acquired by Microsoft) that produced a separate jury verdict earlier in 2024, has been vigorous, even acrimonious, from the start and is notable in part after Judge Andrews granted a motion to compel written materials exchanged between Hamilton Capital and Acceleration Bay prior to the finalization of their litigation funding arrangement, ruling that they were not protected by the attorney-work product doctrine.
Ward identifies himself on social media as having been the CEO with EDGE since January 2018, the company providing "an interactive live streaming experience with Edge Video Network", and the president and CEO of Acceleration Bay since January 2014. A prior iteration of his online bio also included a stint as the founder of CryptoDebt since September 2019. Since the filing of Amazon suit in 2022, Acceleration Bay has identified "Forward People LLC" as its owner. While no entity appears to exist by that name, a ForwardPeople LLC—described as an "enterprise developer" based in Foster City, California and Sydney, Australia—was formed by Ward in California on March 7, 2014.
That May 2024 verdict against Activision Blizzard, also returned by a Delaware jury but before Federal Circuit Judge William H. Bryson, sitting by designation, awarded the plaintiff $23.4M in combined damages, $18M for infringement through provision of the defendant's World of Warcraft video game; and $5.4M, through its Call of Duty. The parties there settled during posttrial briefing, prompting a dismissal with prejudice in August 2024, ending a set of disputes that dates well back, into 2015. More complete coverage of the wider campaign here, as well as that verdict, including the twists and turns leading to it, particularly with respect to Acceleration Bay's damages case, can be found at "Embattled Damages Theory Lands Acceleration Bay a Jury Verdict in Delaware" (May 2024).
Boeing was the original owner of Acceleration Bay's asserted patent portfolio. It is entitled by the sale agreement to Acceleration Bay to 75 percent "of the proceeds from the settlements, sales, and licensing revenues that Plaintiff obtains from the patents". The jury in the Amazon case was asked a key question: whether Amazon proved that The Boeing Company itself, not one of its affiliates, used either accused product prior to the date of sale of the patents to the plaintiff in December 2014. The jury answered "no". A "yes" answer would have cut off Acceleration Bay's case against Amazon per an earlier agreement between Amazon and Boeing.
Comcast's case has yet to be assigned to a judge. 9/26, Northern District of California.
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