The defendants were seeking to dismissal of Stragent’s infringement suit from E.D.Tex include the North American subsidiaries of German automaker BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, as well as Swiss automaker Volvo. The three entities reportedly argue that they do not have any regular place of buisness or are headquartered within the jurisdiction of E.D.Tex. “Supreme Court’s decision is relevant to defendant’s motion because circumstances warranting dismissal in that action are substantially similar to the case. ”
Stragent’s suit alleges that the automaker infringed upon a pair of patent covering technologies covering technologies,
• U.S. Patent No. 8209705, titled System, Method and Computer Program Product for Sharing Information in a Distributed Framework. It protects a method for sharing information in real-time across a distributed control and monitoring system for the electronic communication of certain temporal behaviors of vehicle systems.
• U.S. Patent No. 8566843, same title as ‘705 patent. It claims a non-transitory computer-readable medium storing a computer program product with code for sharing information in a distributed system, storing that information on a bulletin board and issuing notifications based on the state of the information stored on the bulletin board.

Lawsuit

In Stragent’s lawsuit against BMW, the patent licensing firm alleged that BMW’s incorporation of automotive open system architecture (AUTOSAR) into electronic modules installed into the company’s vehicles is the activity infringing upon the ‘705 and ‘843 patents.
The Stragent case is not the only suit filed in E.D. Tex. which is already seeing some impact from SCOTUS’ decision in TC Heartland. Also on May 30th, Law360 reported that a similar motion was filed by Sunnyvale, CA-based networking equipment firm Juniper Networks seeking to dismiss an infringement suit brought by Florida-based tech licensing firm Blue Spike LLC. About a week before Juniper’s filed motion, Blue Spike amended its claim to assert 14 patents, 12 fewer than the 26 which were originally asserted, a total which reportedly made that suit the largest infringement suit in terms of asserted patents in U.S. history.