Intellectual Ventures sues Volvo over patents on day of infringement notice, points Western District of Texas to overlap with General Motors litigation

In yesterday's post on Sisvel's 5G license deal with Microsoft I noted that the European Commission's Directorate-General for the Internal Market (DG GROW) may be underrating the contribution that patent pools make to the standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing process. The situation in the automotive industry also serves as an example: while Avanci has licensed the vast majority of automotive brands in the world (up to 4G, with a 5G licensing program in the works), a couple of owners of smaller cellular SEP portfolios who are not Avanci licensors keep litigating against Avanci licensees.

Less than two weeks ago I reported on GenghisComm's lawsuit against Toyota. Now I found out about the next non-Avanci patent assertion against an automaker: Intellectual Ventures v. Toyota.

In the fall of 2021, IV predicted an "IP reckoning" for the automotive industry and then filed infringement complaints against several car makers. Some of those patent assertions were transferred out of Texas, particularly to Detroit, the geographic center of the traditional (non-Tesla) U.S. auto industry.

Here's the new complaint against Volvo, which interestingly was filed on the same day (yesterday) on which IV gave a formal patent-specific infringement notice to the Swedish car maker:

Intellectual Ventures I LLC and Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. Volvo Car Corporation et al. (W.D. Tex., case no. 6:23-cv-00429): patent infringement complaint

These are the patents-in-suit:

1. U.S. Patent No. 6,832,283 on a "method for addressing network components"; originally filed by Daimler; previously asserted against GM, Honda, Toyota

2. U.S. Patent No. 7,891,004 on a "method for vehicle internetworks"; same family as '008 patent; previously asserted against GM and Honda

3. U.S. Patent No. 9,232,158 on "large dynamic range cameras"; previously asserted against GM, Honda, Toyota

4. U.S. Patent No. 10,292,138 on "determining buffer occupancy and selecting data for transmission on a radio bearer"; from a patent family originally obtained by IPWireless, a company that General Dynamics acquired in 2012; previously asserted against GM, Toyota, Honda

5. U.S. Patent No. 8,953,641 on "methods and apparatus for multi-carrier communications with variable channel bandwidth"; previously asserted against GM, Honda, Toyota

6. U.S. Patent No. 7,684,318 on "shared-communications channel utilization for applications having different class of service requirements"; previously asserted against GM, Honda, Toyota

7. U.S. Patent No. 9,602,608 on a "system and method for notifying a user of people, places or things having attributes matching a user's stated preference"; previously asserted against GM, Toyota, Honda

8. U.S. Patent No. 7,484,008 on a "apparatus for vehicle internetworks"; same family as '004 patent; previously asserted against Toyota

So, Volvo is not the first automaker to be sued over any of those patents. IV points out the overlap with the GM case pending in the same district:

Intellectual Ventures I LLC and Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. Volvo Car Corporation et al. (W.D. Tex., case no. 6:23-cv-00429): notice of related case

Let me make a statement on an unrelated case: yesterday's post on the Optis v. Apple FRAND determination by Mr Justice Marcus Smith (High Court of Justice, England and Wales) has been my most popular patent-related blog post in recent months. Some non-patent antitrust-related posts drew a lot more traffic, but that's not a "comparable" topic. Also, ManagingIP credited me for having broken the news on the outcome of that case, which I appreciate.

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