Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. et al. v. Amazon.com, Inc. et al.

I'll research this case systematically, starting with the docket, the patent, and any PTAB/parallel proceedings.

Good foundation. Now let me dig into the IPR outcome, the claim construction ruling, and the settlement.

Now let me verify the claim construction outcome for the '663 patent and the settlement details.

I'll research this case across docket sources, PTAB records, and legal press. Let me start with several parallel searches.

Good initial haul. Now let me dig into the March 2017 arbitration order, the claim construction order, and the PTAB proceedings.

Now let me get the claim construction order and the pleadings details.

Avago/Broadcom v. Amazon.com — Litigation Chronology and Disposition

Bottom line: The metadata's "outcome not confirmed" is now resolvable. The case never reached trial. It was dismissed in its entirety on 2017-10-03/2017-10-06 upon a global settlement between Broadcom and Amazon (Dkt. 124, 125), roughly six weeks after Judge Selna issued his claim construction ruling and five weeks after the PTAB refused to institute Amazon's IPR against the '663 patent. The dismissal was without prejudice with a 45-day window to reopen. No judgment, no verdict, no appeal.

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1. Filing and initial pleadings

Scope of the case. RPX docket analytics report 11 patents-in-suit; Courthouse News' contemporaneous report (2016-09-27) described "10 tech patents." The '663 was one of them. By the claim construction phase, the joint appendix covered eight patents — the '805, '636, '387, '663, '087, '844, '389 and '375 (Dkt. 98, 2017-07-17). I could not confirm from public sources whether Amazon pleaded counterclaims (as opposed to affirmative defenses only); the docket text for Dkt. 23 describes an "ANSWER … with JURY DEMAND," and the March 2017 order discusses the tenth (breach of contract/license) and eleventh (arbitration) affirmative defenses.

The defenses that mattered. Amazon's tenth and eleventh defenses were built on a 2016 AWS Customer Agreement between Broadcom and AWS, containing a no-assert covenant: Broadcom agreed not to assert patent claims "against us or any of our affiliates… regarding any Service Offerings you have used," and Broadcom had used EC2 and CloudFront. Amazon argued this barred the suit and compelled arbitration.

2. Pre-trial motions of substance

(a) Duelling arbitration/pleadings motions — the case's central pretrial ruling.

• 2017-01-30: Plaintiffs moved for judgment on the pleadings as to Amazon's 10th and 11th defenses and for an order on arbitration (Dkt. 38).

• 2017-02-10: Amazon moved to compel arbitration (Dkt. 47).

• 2017-02-07: Judge Selna denied Amazon's motion to file the arbitration motion under seal (Dkt. 44), with the memorable line that he "will not endorse wholesale sealing of a motion which should raise few if any confidentiality issues."

• 2017-03-13: Hearing; taken under submission (Dkt. 73).

• 2017-03-22: Order (Dkt. 76) — granting in part/denying in part plaintiffs' motion and denying Amazon's motion to compel arbitration. Holdings:

  • Avago and Amazon.com are not bound by the 2016 agreement; only AWS and Broadcom signed it. The court refused to treat corporate affiliates as interchangeable for arbitration purposes ("arbitration is a matter of contract").
  • Eleventh defense (arbitration) struck.
  • Tenth defense (breach of contract / patent license) survived — the court accepted as plausible that the AWS Customer Agreement's no-assert clause operated as a contractual bar to Broadcom's infringement claims on accused AWS-used offerings.

  This was the strategic hinge: Amazon lost the arbitration gambit but kept a live contract defense going into claim construction.

(b) Motions not filed / not present on the docket. I found no Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss, no motion to transfer venue, no motion for summary judgment, and — importantly — no motion to stay pending IPR, notwithstanding four Amazon IPRs and two AMD IPRs. Judge Selna kept the case on a trial track throughout. I flag this as a negative finding from search-level docket review rather than a certified PACER docket read.

(c) Scheduling. 2017-01-30 scheduling conference order (Dkt. 40) set Markman for 2017-07-31, fact discovery cutoff 2017-12-15, final pretrial conference 2018-09-04, and jury trial 2018-09-25. Trial-setting order followed 2017-02-01 (Dkt. 41).

3. Discovery milestones of strategic significance

• 2017-02-09 → 2017-03-06: Broadcom's motion to compel discovery responses (Dkt. 45). Mag. Judge Gandhi sua sponte ordered in-person meet-and-confer (Dkt. 54, 2017-02-22), then granted the motion at the 2017-03-06 hearing (Dkt. 65).
• 2017-03-14: Order granting the motion to compel and awarding attorneys' fees (Dkt. 74) — an early cost sanction against Amazon, and a signal the court viewed Amazon's discovery conduct as deficient. The same day, a stipulated protective order issued (Dkt. 75).
• 2017-04-05 → 2017-04-20: Broadcom obtained letters rogatory for international judicial assistance from Singapore (Dkts. 79, 82, 83) — a Singapore-focused discovery track, consistent with Avago's Singapore IP-holding entity and witness Tan Boon Keat (Dkt. 37). Significance: plaintiffs were building proof on ownership/assignment and damages through offshore testimony.
• 2017-04-17 → 2017-04-24: Multiple stipulated extensions of Amazon's invalidity contentions (P.R. 3-3/3-4) and plaintiffs' interrogatory responses, expressly "in View of Progress Between Parties to Resolve Case" (Dkt. 84/85, 2017-04-24). This is documentary evidence that settlement discussions were underway by April 2017 — five months before the formal notice.
• 2017-06-05 / 2017-06-23: Interim status conference and order (Dkt. 97) narrowing the case to ten claims for initial adjudication (Dkt. 92) and ten "significant" claim terms (Dkt. 94) — a docket-management narrowing that materially shrank the '663's exposure.

4. Claim construction (Markman)

• 2017-05-19: Joint claim construction and prehearing statement (Dkt. 88).
• 2017-07-17: Opening claim construction briefs and joint appendix (Dkts. 98–100); technology tutorial held, with the court permitting an oscilloscope to be brought into Courtroom 10C (Dkt. 105, 2017-07-28).
• 2017-08-04: Responsive briefs with duelling expert declarations (Jayant, Oblobdzija, Acton for plaintiffs; Weissman, Scordilis for Amazon) (Dkts. 109–110).
• 2017-08-17: Markman continued sua sponte from 2017-08-21 to 2017-08-29 (Dkt. 116).
• 2017-08-29: Markman hearing; tentative ruling issued, matter taken under submission (Dkt. 117).
• 2017-09-01: Claim construction order (Dkt. 118).

Substance of the ruling (partial). The publicly available text of the order shows the court applying Phillips and § 112(6) / Williamson v. Citrix to Amazon's indefiniteness challenges directed at three disputed terms in the '805, '636 and '087 patents, with Broadcom arguing the terms were well known and needed no construction. I was unable to retrieve the court's specific constructions of the '663 terms ("binarization," "threshold," "codeword," etc.) from public sources. Any statement about how the '663 fared at Markman would therefore be unsourced, and I decline to guess. What is clear is the timing: the ruling issued 2017-09-01 and the case settled 2017-10-03 — the settlement came after, not before, the court's claim-construction positions were known to both sides.

5. Trial, verdict, post-trial motions

None occurred. The 2018-09-25 jury trial date and 2018-09-04 final pretrial conference were never

Press coverage of Avago/Broadcom v. Amazon (C.D. Cal. 8:16-cv-01774)

Coverage of this case was almost entirely litigation-docket trade reporting rather than mainstream or analytical press. The filing was reported by Law360 on 2016-09-26 under the headline "Amazon Hit With Patent Suit By Broadcom Over Tablets, Tech," describing Avago Technologies and its newly acquired Broadcom Corp. as accusing Amazon of infringing 11 patents through the Fire HD 10 tablet and other products. Courthouse News Service reported the same filing on 2016-09-27 from Santa Ana, but put the number of asserted patents at 10 — a discrepancy against Law360's 11 (docket aggregator RPX also lists 11 patents-in-suit, suggesting Courthouse News undercounted). The most detailed early account came from Northern California Record, which named the accused products (Fire HD 10 tablets, Dash buttons, Fire TV, and Amazon Elastic Transcoder) and reported that plaintiffs sought an injunction, damages, exemplary and treble damages, and a jury trial, with Robert E. Freitas, Jason S. Angell and Jessica N. Leal of Freitas Angell & Weinberg LLP as counsel. None of the press accounts I located singled out U.S. Patent No. 6,982,663 (Winger, "Method and System for Symbol Binarization") by name; the '663 patent appears in the complaint and claim-construction record as one of the asserted patents, not as a focus of reporting.

The most substantively reported ruling was the arbitration fight. Law360 reported on 2017-02-13 that "Amazon Seeks Arbitration In Broadcom Tablet, Tech IP Suit," asking Judge Selna to compel arbitration of four claims on the theory that Broadcom had accepted the AWS Customer Agreement containing an arbitration clause, and then on 2017-03-23 reported "Amazon Loses Bid To Arbitrate Broadcom Tablet, Tech IP Row," summarizing the ruling as holding that "Broadcom didn't agree to arbitrate its claims when it signed a customer agreement with Amazon Web Services." That framing is a fair shorthand but goes beyond the opinion's reasoning: the court's 2017-03-22 order turned on a 2013 Amendment No. 1 to the AWS Customer Agreement, whose forum terms the court found conflicted with and superseded the 2016 arbitration clause, and separately held that Avago and Amazon.com were not signatories and could not be compelled to arbitrate (order available via A&O Shearman's arbitration database. The press accounts did not report that second, independent signatory holding.

The case ended in settlement, reported by Law360 on 2017-10-10 as "Amazon, Broadcom Settle Patent Suit Over Tablets, Other Tech" — describing claims that Amazon sold infringing Fire tablets and Fire TV devices but disclosing no settlement terms, no damages figure, and no royalty rate. Trade outlet Display Daily also reported the resolution under the headline "Amazon Patent Infringement Case Settled Out of Court," likewise without terms. The docket and PTAB record confirm timing and scope rather than amounts: RPX lists the case as closed on 2017-10-06, and Amazon's joint motions to dismiss its IPRs — including those on the '663 patent (IPR2017-00964 and IPR2017-01182) and on the '087, '805 and other patents — represent that the district court "dismissed the case upon notification from the parties of a broader settlement of disputes between Broadcom and Amazon," with the agreement filed only as confidential business information (see, e.g., the IPR2017-01816 joint motion to dismiss and the IPR2017-01433 termination decision).

Two caveats about the press record are worth flagging. First, I did not locate any Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Ars Technica, The Verge, IPWatchdog, Patently-O, EFF Deeplinks, or JD Supra article specifically covering this case in my searches; the coverage that exists is concentrated in Law360's case page, Courthouse News' one-line filing brief, Northern California Record's complaint summary, and Display Daily's short settlement item. Second, there is essentially no analyst commentary, executive statement, or market-impact reporting to weigh against the court record — no outlet reported a demand figure, a settlement value, or an industry reaction, and the company's own 10-K disclosure of the dispute (as captured in Amazon's 2017 annual report) is a bare litigation note. Any claim that the case was "significant" for Fire device economics, or that a particular number changed hands, is unsupported by the reporting I found.

Sources

• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• ROBERT E
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• Broadcom Corporation et al v. Amazon.com, Inc. et al
• UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA
• 8:16-cv-01774 - Avago Technologies General IP (singapore) Pte Ltd et al. v. Amazon Com Inc et al. - 8:16-cv-01774 - Avago Technologies General IP (singapore) Pte Ltd et al. v. Amazon Com Inc et al.Report Error
• 134. On April 24, 2018, "Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) Pte
• Amazon.com, Inc. v. Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) Pte. Ltd.
• IPR2017-01433, No. 13 Termination Decision Document - Termination Decision Document (P.T.A.B. Oct. 27, 2017) - IPR2017-01433, No
• 8:16-cv-01774 | Broadcom Corporation et al v. Amazon.com, Inc. et al | RPX Insight
• UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA
• In September 2016, Broadcom Corporation and Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) PTE Ltd

I'll research the docket and related sources for plaintiff-side counsel in this case.

Counsel of Record for Plaintiffs — Avago Techs. Gen. IP (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. & Broadcom Corp. v. Amazon.com, Inc. & Amazon Web Services, Inc., No. 8:16-cv-01774-JVS-JCGx (C.D. Cal.)

Bottom line: Plaintiffs were represented throughout by the boutique firm Freitas Angell & Weinberg LLP of Redwood Shores, California — no separate local counsel, no in-house appearance, and no pro hac vice admissions on the plaintiff side. The core team was Jason S. Angell (attorney of record who opened the case and signed nearly every substantive filing), Robert E. Freitas (name partner, listed as plaintiff's attorney on the case-initiating records), Jing H. Cherng (added as counsel of record in April 2017 and the workhorse on discovery/claim construction), and Jessica N. Leal (associate listed as plaintiff's counsel).

Attorney-by-attorney

Sourcing and gaps you should know about

• Complaint and attorney addition: the C.D. Cal. docket entry for Dkt. 1 (9/23/2016) reads "Attorney Jason S Angell added to party Avago Technologies General IP (Singapore) Pte. Ltd.(pty:pla), Attorney Jason S Angell added to party Broadcom Corporation(pty:pla)" — i.e., Angell is the formal attorney of record. (Docket text reproduced at Unified Patents portal and RPX Insight.)
• The four-attorney plaintiff roster (Angell, Freitas, Leal) appears in the Unicourt docket summary for 8:16-cv-01774 (unicourt.com) and is consistent with the filing-day press report: "They are represented by Robert E. Freitas, Jason S. Angell and Jessica N. Leal of Freitas Angell & Weinberg LLP in Redwood Shores" (NorCal Record).
• Cherng's firm, address and registration numbers are confirmed by the Patent Owner's Power of Attorney and Mandatory Notice Avago filed in the Amazon IPRs, listing "Jason S. Angell (Reg. No. 51,408)" as lead and "Jing H. Cherng (Reg. No. 68,144)" as backup, both at Freitas Angell & Weinberg LLP, 350 Marine Parkway, Suite 200, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 (IPR2017-01816 papers).
• Angell's background (Orrick → co-founder of FAW in 2011; lead counsel in patent and PTAB matters; this Amazon case and the related IPRs; now of counsel at Hopkins & Carley) is from his Hopkins & Carley professional bio.
• Not found / not verifiable: No in-house counsel for Avago or Broadcom appears on the docket (Broadcom's in-house team did appear in other Broadcom matters, but I found no appearance here). No local-counsel firm separate from FAW appears — FAW's Redwood Shores office served that function. No pro hac vice applications by plaintiffs' counsel appear in the docket (unlike defendants, who admitted Alan M. Fisch and Roy W. Sigler pro hac vice with L. Katie Machado as local counsel, Dkts. 56 and related). I did not pull the raw PACER docket sheet itself; the docket-derived detail above comes from the court's own posted Civil Minutes (e.g., the 3/22/2017 arbitration order and 9/1/2017 claim-construction order), the C.D. Cal. entries reproduced by Unified Patents/RPX/Patexia, and contemporaneous press coverage. If you need signature-block-level verification (particularly for Freitas and Leal), the sealed and non-sealed PDFs at Dkts. 1, 35–38, 45, 58, 62, 91, 94 and 99, plus the 9/1/2017 Markman order, would settle it.

Two contextual notes for your section

1. The '663 patent did not have separate counsel. It was one of eight patents in the July 17, 2017 Joint Appendix (Exhibit 4, U.S. Patent 6,982,663, "Method and System for Symbol Binarization," Dkt. 99) and was addressed in the Court's September 1, 2017 claim-construction order along with the '805, '636, '087, '387 and '844 patents — all handled by the same FAW team.
2. The case closed on October 5–6, 2017 (Unified Patents termination date 2017-10-05; RPX closed 10/06/2017), after the parties jointly moved in April 2017 to extend deadlines "in View of Progress Between Parties to Resolve Case" (Dkt. 90). I could not retrieve the dismissal entry itself, so the precise mechanism (settlement vs. voluntary dismissal) remains unconfirmed — and the same team (then at Hopkins & Carley) re-asserted the '663 patent against Netflix in 2020, which is worth flagging if your outcome section assumes the '663 patent was resolved on the merits here.

I'll research the counsel of record for Amazon.com and AWS in this case.

Let me dig into the docket and firm affiliations.

Counsel of Record for Defendants Amazon.com, Inc. and Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Sourcing caveat up front: I was not able to pull the full PACER docket sheet directly. The roster below is reconstructed from the C.D. Cal. docket entries as mirrored on Unified Patents' litigation database and Patexia, plus PHV orders quoted in those dockets and Amazon's own PTAB filings (which list the same trial team). The entries I could verify are cited; anything I could not verify is flagged rather than guessed.

Verified appearances

1. Alan M. Fisch — lead trial counsel (pro hac vice)

• Firm: Fisch Sigler LLP, 5301 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Fourth Floor, Washington, D.C. 20015.
• Docket basis: Non-resident attorney application to appear PHV on behalf of Amazon.com and AWS; granted by Judge Selna's order designating L. Katie Machado as local counsel (Dkt. 28 application; order granting).
• Experience note: Fisch Sigler's managing partner and Amazon's outside patent trial counsel of choice; the firm's own materials claim four defense-side patent jury wins in the Eastern District of Texas and nine argued Federal Circuit cases, including wins for Amazon.com, Costco, Gap and Pier 1. He is the architect of Amazon's IPR strategy against Avago here (see PTAB note below).

2. Roy William ("Bill") Sigler — trial counsel (pro hac vice)

• Firm: Fisch Sigler LLP (Washington, D.C.).
• Docket basis: PHV application granted by Judge Selna on Feb. 24, 2017 (Dkt. 55 application; Dkt. 56 order), designating L. Katie Machado as local counsel.
• Experience note: Fisch Sigler partner who appears alongside Fisch on Amazon's patent defense and IPR/appellate work (e.g., later appearing for Amazon in Kove IO v. AWS and for Juniper in Juniper v. Swarm).

3. David M. Saunders — California counsel of record

• Firm: Fisch Sigler LLP, San Jose office (96 North Third Street, Suite 260, San Jose, CA 95112).
• Docket basis: Notice of Appearance adding him as counsel of record for both Amazon.com and AWS (C.D. Cal. docket, Unified Patents mirror).
• Experience note: The California-barred Fisch Sigler attorney handling local discovery/coordination for Amazon; he was simultaneously listed as back-up counsel on Amazon's IPR petitions against Avago's patents (e.g., IPR2017-01816 on U.S. Patent 5,870,087 and the '375 petition), so he spans both the district court and PTAB tracks.

4. Gregory L. Doll — local counsel (Los Angeles)

• Firm: Doll Amir & Eley LLP, Los Angeles (1888 Century Park East, Suite 1850, Los Angeles, CA 90067; firm also used 725 S. Figueroa Street, Suite 3275).
• Docket basis: "Notice of Appearance or Withdrawal of Counsel … Adding Gregory L. Doll as counsel of record for Amazon.com, Inc. and Amazon Web Services, Inc.," entered 12/14/2016.
• Experience note: Doll Amir & Eley's founding partner and a recurring Los Angeles local counsel for Amazon in C.D. Cal. patent cases (e.g., he filed Amazon's extension stipulation in 2:19-cv-00893-JWH-SK). California litigation generalist rather than a patent specialist.

5. L. Katie Machado — designated local counsel

• Docket basis: Named as the local counsel designee in Judge Selna's PHV orders admitting both Alan Fisch and Roy William Sigler; separately filed a Notice of Appearance/Withdrawal of Counsel form adding her as counsel of record for Amazon.com and AWS (entry appears adjacent to Doll's 12/14/2016 notice on the docket).
• Firm: Not confirmed. The docket entries I could retrieve do not state her firm, and I was unable to verify it before exhausting my search budget. Given that she served as the local-counsel designee alongside Doll, Doll Amir & Eley is the plausible affiliation, but I am not asserting it as fact.

In-house counsel

No Amazon in-house attorney appears in the docket entries I could retrieve. I cannot rule out an in-house lawyer appearing later in the case; the docket mirror I used is incomplete and I did not see a full caption list.

Parallel PTAB counsel (not district-court counsel of record, but the same defense team)

Amazon's IPR petitions against Avago's patents (including IPR2017-01816, U.S. Patent 5,870,087, and the petition on the '375 patent) list:

• Joseph F. Edell — lead counsel, Fisch Sigler LLP, Washington, D.C. (Reg. No. 67,625).
• Richard Z. Zhang — back-up counsel, Fisch Sigler LLP.
• Alicia Meros Carney — Fisch Sigler LLP (lead counsel on earlier Amazon IPRs, e.g., IPR2015-00480).

Gaps and confidence levels

What I could not confirm: (1) Ms. Machado's firm; (2) whether any of these attorneys withdrew or were substituted before the case's scheduled Sept. 25, 2018 trial date, since I could not review the docket past early 2017 entries; (3) whether any sealed filings name additional counsel. For a definitive list, the operative document is the C.D. Cal. docket sheet in 8:16-cv-01774-JVS-JCGx (filed 09/23/2016, closed), which should be pulled from PACER directly.