Thursday, December 22, 2022

Another Huawei v. Amazon patent infringement lawsuit discovered: WiFi patent case in Mannheim, Germany

This is a quick follow-up to a post from Monday, Huawei suing Amazon in Germany over WiFi patent infringement--Chinese lawsuit previously became known.

Meanwhile the Landgericht Mannheim (Mannheim Regional Court) has also confirmed a Huawei v. Amazon action: case no. 2 O 109/22 (Presiding Judge: Dr. Holger Kircher) over EP2589177 on "modulation of signal field in a wlan [= WiFi] frame header".

The Munich I Regional Court hasn't confirmed a Huawei v. Amazon case yet, but two factors make it a possibility that Amazon also has to defend itself there:

  • Munich is such a popular venue that it would be unusual (if not even unheard of in recent years) to see a Dusseldorf-Mannheim combination as opposed to the traditional Dusseldorf-Mannheim-Munich "Grand Slam".

  • Different German litigators--none of them likely to be involved with this dispute here--have mentioned to me recently that the Munich court has an administrative bottleneck that results in considerable delay of (especially international) service of process. When cases are filed in Dusseldorf, Mannheim, and Munich on the same day against the same defendants, it is normally expected that any Munich complaints will be served much later on a given foreign defendant than the ones brought in Dusseldorf and Mannheim.

For those two reasons, I'll ask the Munich court again in January.

In the previous post on this dispute, you can find some further context, such as cases pending in China and in another German court (Dusseldorf Regional Court).