Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc. v. HP Inc.

Background

UCT brought this patent-infringement case against HP, accusing certain HP products of infringing eight patents. After the case was transferred to the Northern District of California, UCT served updated infringement contentions. The court allowed UCT to amend its contentions but later granted HP’s motion to strike in part, removing portions with and without permission to amend.

UCT then served third amended infringement contentions accusing more than 2,000 HP products. UCT did not provide a separate chart for every product and continued to rely on representative products. HP renewed its motion to strike on the ground that this reliance remained deficient. The court granted HP’s renewed motion in part and struck portions of UCT’s third amended contentions without leave to amend.

UCT filed a motion for relief from that nondispositive pretrial order. It challenged two rulings: the striking of contentions involving products with processors from manufacturers whose processors were not charted through a representative product, and the striking of all peripheral products for all asserted patents without leave to amend.

Legal standard

Under 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1)(A), a district court may set aside a magistrate judge’s nondispositive order if it is clearly erroneous or contrary to law. A factual finding is clearly erroneous only when the court has a definite and firm conviction that a mistake was made. A ruling is contrary to law if it applies the wrong legal standard or fails to consider an element of the applicable standard. The district court may not simply substitute its judgment for the magistrate judge’s judgment.

NVIDIA processor contentions

UCT argued that its third amended contentions adequately explained why NVIDIA graphics processors supported the accused functionality for the ’905 and ’307 patents. UCT relied on a statement that it expected each NVIDIA architecture used in the accused products to support the same charted DisplayPort functionality in substantially the same way.

Judge Noél Wise rejected that argument. The court concluded that this explanation relied on inferences and did not adequately explain how the NVIDIA architecture implemented the accused standards in each non-charted, non-representative HP product. The court agreed that it may be reasonable to expect processors of the same kind from the same manufacturer to implement industry standards similarly, but that UCT’s limited explanation did not support the same expectation for different processors or processors from different manufacturers. The court denied UCT’s motion for relief on this issue.

Peripheral products

UCT also argued that the court should not have struck all contentions concerning peripheral products without leave to amend. UCT maintained that the information needed to complete those contentions was not available publicly and that HP had not provided it. UCT further argued that its contentions gave HP notice that third-party components in peripheral products operated the same way as components in laptops and desktop computers from the same manufacturer.

The court held that UCT had not shown the earlier ruling was contrary to law because it did not identify an incorrect legal standard or a missing element of the applicable standard. The court also agreed that UCT had not raised a reasonable inference of infringement or adequately notified HP of its infringement theories for the peripheral products. The court denied UCT’s motion for relief on this issue as well.

Disposition

Judge Noél Wise concluded that the earlier order was not clearly erroneous or contrary to law. The court denied UCT’s motion for relief from that order.