Google has managed to avoid having to fight patent troll Rockstar Consortium in a Texas court that lawyers consider nicer toward plaintiffs
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday ordered proceedings stayed in Texas over whether handsets made by Samsung Electronics, HTC, AsuSTEK, LG Electronics and ZTE infringed on Rockstar’s patents because they used Google’s Android.
Rockstar had filed the lawsuits in a Texas federal court and Google filed a lawsuit in northern California in which it asked a judge to rule that devices using the Android platform had not infringed the patents cited by Rockstar.
The overlaps led the appeals court to rule that the spat should be decided first in California.
The court said that there was no need to proceed with the five Texas actions because the one California action would do. “There will be substantial similarity involving the infringement and invalidity issues in all the cases”, whatever that means.
Rockstar which as Apple as an investor, outbid Google and paid $4.5 billion for thousands of former Nortel Network patents as the networking products supplier went bankrupt in 2011.
