Defendant
3 cases as defendant.
Company overview. WhatsApp Inc. — now commonly styled WhatsApp LLC — is a wholly owned subsidiary of Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META). Founded in February 2009 by former Yahoo engineers Jan Koum and Brian Acton, it was originally based in Mountain View, California and is now headquartered at Meta's Menlo Park, California campus. Facebook announced the acquisition on Feb. 19, 2014 for roughly $19 billion ($4B cash, $12B stock, $3B restricted stock units); it closed in October 2014. WhatsApp is not separately traded and discloses no standalone revenue. It had about 55 employees at acquisition; third-party workforce trackers estimate current headcount in the low thousands, but figures vary by source.
Products / services. WhatsApp operates a free, cross-platform messaging and calling service — WhatsApp Messenger — offering text, voice and video messages, group chats, voice/video calls, status updates, Channels and Communities, with end-to-end encryption, plus business-facing offerings such as WhatsApp Business. It is an operating company with real consumer products and no patent-assertion business.
Patent-litigation posture. WhatsApp appears as defendant in three tracked records and as plaintiff/petitioner in four. These are two facets of one dispute: the three defendant entries are the same 2018 district-court action docketed across Central District of California divisions, and the four plaintiff entries are inter partes review petitions filed at the PTAB. WhatsApp is therefore an operating company defending a patent suit and counter-attacking at the PTAB — not an NPE or shell licensor. No tracked cases sit in the Eastern District of Texas.
Notable cases. BlackBerry Limited v. Facebook, Inc. et al. (C.D. Cal. 2:18-cv-01844, filed March 6, 2018) accused Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram of infringing seven BlackBerry patents on mobile messaging — messaging UI, message preview/notification, notification silencing, public-key generation and messaging-gaming integration — naming WhatsApp Messenger as an accused product. The court entered final judgment for the defendants on the '351 and '929 patents in November 2019. WhatsApp's own PTAB petitions (e.g., IPR2019-00706, -00899, -00925, -00940) challenged BlackBerry patents; the Board found claims of the '713 patent unpatentable.
BlackBerry asserted the '236 patent only against WhatsApp, Inc. (claims 15 and 17). On July 23, 2020, the court granted Defendants' motion for summary judgment holding the asserted '236 claims invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The parties settled confidentially and the case terminated on Feb. 16, 2021.
2016 E.D. Tex. suit in which Uniloc asserted U.S. Patent No. 8,995,433 against WhatsApp, Inc. Docket number not mapped in the narrative.
Appeal from the Facebook/LG IPR Final Written Decision. The Federal Circuit held that 35 U.S.C. §314(d) does not bar review of the Board's §315(e)(1) estoppel determination where the estoppel-triggering event occurred after institution; the Board correctly found LG, and Facebook as to claim 7, not estopped; and the obviousness determination that all challenged '433 claims were unpatentable was affirmed. Related Nos. 19-1689, 19-1180, 19-1182, 19-2165, and 19-2167 were also listed.