US district court patent litigation rises 20% in August

US district court patent case filing rose 20% in August from July, according to data pulled from Docket Navigator on September 7 2018.

The number of filings for August was 388 in comparison with 323 in July. August received the second highest number of filings for 2018; only March is ahead of it with 403.

The number of filings in August is 11% higher than the average monthly number for the year so far of 348.4 cases. Despite the increase in numbers, the amount of filings for August 2018 is still not as high as the number for August 2017, which had 416 filings. There has therefore been a 7% decrease in August numbers between the two years.

Data showing filing numbers for August 2012 to August 2018 reveals that the filing numbers for August 2018 are the second lowest in these years. Only August 2015 had a lower number, with 310 filings.

The top plaintiffs in August 2018 were Level 3 Communications (26 cases), PersonalWeb Technologies (26), Express Mobile (25) and Uniloc (11).

The top four plaintiffs have some overlap with the top plaintiffs for July as well as those for the first half of the year. Uniloc was the top plaintiff in July with 25 filings. PersonalWeb Technologies and Level 3 Communications also featured at the top of the plaintiffs list in July, though they were each only involved in seven cases. In the first half of the year, Level 3 Communications (76), PersonalWeb Technologies (76) and Uniloc (48) all featured in the top three. Express Mobile was not at the top of the plaintiff table for either July or the first half of the year.

Level 3 Communications and PersonalWeb were plaintiffs on the same cases in August. They sued companies including Brooklyn Brewery, Wework and Cars.com, asserting a total of four patents related to accessing data in a data processing system and enforcement of licensed content using content-based identifiers.

The two plaintiffs have filed 111 cases this year, as of the end of August. Some 74 of them were filed in the Northern District of California, 15 in Delaware, 13 in the Southern District of New York, five in the Eastern District of Texas and four in the Eastern District of New York.

Express Mobile’s 25 cases in August pushed its 2018 filings to 34 total cases, eight of which were filed in January while one was filed in June. Two patents are being asserted in the cases, both entitled “Browser based web site generation tool and run time engine”.

The top defendants for August 2018 were Huawei (which was a defendant in five cases), LG Electronics (five), Amazon.com (four) and AT&T (three).

A number of other companies come next in the list as defendants in two cases. These companies include Apple, Samsung, Teva and ZTE. Amazon was involved in 14 cases in July. Other names at the top of the list in July, which are also near the top of the list in August are Teva, ZTE and Apple. The top defendants in August are not very different from those for the first half of the year. The defendants involved in the most cases in the first half of the year were Apple (30), Samsung (25), LG Electronics (25), Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (24), Zydus (15) and Amazon.com (14). Huawei was fairly near the top of the list. It was involved in 11 cases.