Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Altice USA, Inc.

I'll research this case and its broader context before writing.

Now let me research the patents and Cedar Lane's background.

Case overview

Parties. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is the plaintiff — a Canadian corporation with a stated principal place of business in Nelson, British Columbia, and, per the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, an entity whose assertions rest entirely on acquired patents (category "1 – Acquired patents"), i.e., a classic non-practicing/patent-assertion entity rather than an operating company or university. Its Delaware filings in this matter were signed by local counsel David de Bruin (D.I. 1), consistent with Cedar Lane's national practice of pairing a Delaware firm with its regular Texas-based patent prosecution/litigation counsel Isaac Rabicoff, who appears in its parallel W.D. Tex. and E.D. Tex. suits. Defendant Altice USA, Inc. is an operating company — a publicly traded U.S. cable/broadband and telecommunications provider (Optimum-branded TV, internet and voice service, formerly the U.S. arm of the Luxembourg-based Altice group) and the fourth-largest U.S. cable operator. So this is an operating-company defendant in the communications sector, matching the "Communications" sector tag in the case metadata.

What's accused. The docket confirms the complaint was filed 2022-04-12 with a jury demand and six exhibits (D.I. 1, Exs. 1–6), which in Cedar Lane's template practice are the patents plus infringement claim charts (compare its other complaints, e.g., Cedar Lane v. Alps Alpine, W.D. Wash. No. 2:23-cv-00001, where the complaint expressly incorporates "charts comparing the Exemplary '242 Patent Claims to the Exemplary Defendant Products"). I could not retrieve the body of D.I. 1 or the claim charts for this case, so the precise accused instrumentality is not verified. Given that the three asserted patents all relate to remote-control/command-functionality in consumer electronics (see below) and that the same-day companion Delaware suits targeted other multichannel-video/broadband and equipment defendants (Cox Communications and Procemex among the associated cases 1:22-cv-00471/-472/-473), the likely target is Altice's Optimum TV set-top/service platform and its voice-enabled remote control. That is an inference from the patent subject matter and Cedar Lane's campaign pattern, not a sourced fact.

Patents asserted. The AO-120 report filed with the complaint (and re-filed at dismissal, D.I. 9) lists three patents:

• US 6,629,077 B1 — "Universal remote control adapted to receive voice input" (filed 11/22/2000, issued 9/30/2003; now expired). Claim 1 covers a remote with both buttons and a microphone that decides whether input is voice or button, and in a "first mode" sends alphanumeric symbol codes to support network communication functions while in a "second mode" sends conventional device command codes.
• US 8,165,867 B1 — per Unified Patents' description, "wirelessly controlling an electronic device with another electronic device in real time." (I was not able to verify the formal title/abstract text; Unified's characterization is the best-sourced technical sketch available.)
• US 6,978,475 — the third patent in the AO-120 and in the complaint's exhibit set. I could not verify its title, claims, or expiration status from the sources reviewed; sources confirm only that Cedar Lane asserted it alongside the '077 and '867 in this Delaware batch (e.g., the Cox complaint's AO-120 lists '475 and '867). I'd rather flag that gap than invent a technical sketch.

Procedural posture and venue

Filed in the District of Delaware and assigned to Judge Richard G. Andrews (case suffix -RGA), with an initial answer deadline of 5/5/2022 after service on Altice on 4/14/2022 (D.I. 6). Cedar Lane itself moved for an unopposed extension (D.I. 7), which Judge Andrews so-ordered on 4/22/2022, resetting the answer to 6/20/2022. Altice never answered: Cedar Lane filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal on 6/21/2022 (D.I. 8), the case was closed 6/22/2022, and the AO-120 with the dismissal notice was sent to the PTO on 6/23/2022 (D.I. 9). Total life: roughly ten weeks, with no motion practice, no answer, no Markman, and no publicly docketed settlement or license. D. Del. was the natural forum because Altice USA is a Delaware-incorporated entity — the standard general-venue predicate in these filings, though I could not pull the civil cover sheet to confirm the pleaded basis, and the docket shows only that both parties accepted the assignment without a transfer motion. Delaware matters here for a different reason than usual: Judge Andrews is one of the district's most experienced patent judges and a magnet for exactly this kind of short-lived NPE case, which is why four Cedar Lane complaints landed on his docket the same day.

Why it's notable

The case is significant mainly as a data point in a larger campaign, not as an adjudication. First, it is part of an April 12, 2022 Delaware cluster (1:22-cv-00470 through -473) in which Cedar Lane simultaneously sued a cable operator (Altice), another major cable/broadband provider (Cox), and equipment/imaging vendors, pressing 1999–2003-era consumer-electronics patents against modern video and voice-remote ecosystems. Second, the patents are prime IPR/crowdsourcing targets: Unified Patents ran a Patroll prior-art contest on the '867 patent (prize $3,000, running January–March 2021), stating that the '867 had been asserted against D-Link, Disney, Dish Network, Comcast, LG, iHeart, ViacomCBS, TCL and Sirius XM — and Unified has already killed one Cedar Lane patent at the PTAB, obtaining a final written decision on February 12, 2021 holding the asserted independent claim of US 7,173,177 unpatentable (a patent Cedar Lane acquired from AVInnov, previously Intellectual Ventures). That combination — expired or aging acquired patents, a large defendant pool in subscription TV, and a well-funded defensive aggregator generating invalidity art — is the archetypal 2021–2022 NPE-vs-MVPD dynamic. Third, the swift voluntary dismissal before answer is consistent with Cedar Lane's documented pattern across dozens of suits (compare Cedar Lane v. Fujitsu, W.D. Tex. No. 6:21-cv-01361, dismissed 3/31/2022; Cedar Lane v. Texas Instruments, E.D. Tex. No. 2:22-cv-00087, dismissed 5/19/2022): the suits function as licensing leverage rather than litigation, with the practical effect that no merits ruling, claim construction, or validity determination exists for these three patents in this case. Fourth, the campaign had enough market visibility that Cedar Lane demands show up in public-company risk disclosures — Dish Network's FY2021 Form 10-K discusses Cedar Lane's October 13, 2020 assertion and warns of potential treble damages and injunctive relief.

Sourcing caveats: docket events and dates are from the DocketBird/Patexia/CourtListener RECAP entries for 1:22-cv-00470 (D.I. 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9) and Unified Patents' Portal; patent characterization for the '077 comes from the patent record (RPX patent page); for the '867 from Unified's Patroll contest page; the accused product, the '475's scope, and the dismissal's terms (with/without prejudice, any license) are not established by any source I located and should be treated as unverified.

I'll research the docket and the parallel PTAB proceedings on these three patents.

Key legal developments and outcome

Bottom line: there is no merits adjudication in this case because there was no contested proceeding. The litigation consists of nine docket entries over ten weeks: a template complaint, service, one plaintiff-filed extension motion, and a plaintiff-filed notice of voluntary dismissal. No answer, no counterclaim, no Rule 12 motion, no transfer/stay motion, no Markman, no discovery, no trial, no judgment, no appeal. The final disposition is a plaintiff-initiated voluntary dismissal under Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i) entered before any responsive pleading was served, which under the rule operates without prejudice by default and therefore carries no res judicata / claim-preclusion effect on the three patents.

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Chronology of substantive events

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1. Filing and initial pleadings

The complaint (D.I. 1) was a nine-page pleading with a jury demand and six exhibits. In Cedar Lane's template, those exhibits are the three patents plus claim charts; the AO-120 confirms the patent set (6,629,077; 6,978,475; 8,165,867), and the exhibit page counts (13, 12, 8, 17, 19, 21 pages) are consistent with patents-plus-charts rather than patents alone — but the accused instrumentality is still unverified (see the case-overview caveat; the body of D.I. 1 was not retrievable through free RECAP mirrors).

The Rule 7.1 disclosure (D.I. 3) stated "No Parents or Affiliates Listed," which is worth noting as a legal-development data point: Cedar Lane did not disclose any litigation-funding or parent relationship, and no defendant ever had the opportunity to press a real-party-in-interest or funding-disclosure issue because none appeared.

There was no answer and no counterclaim. The docket contains no responsive pleading of any kind. This is dispositive of the case's legal significance: no invalidity, non-infringement, inequitable conduct, or unenforceability defense was ever pleaded, so there is no judicial determination — not even an admitted one — on any of the three patents.

2. Pre-trial motions of substance

None. Specifically, none of the following were filed:

• No Rule 12(b)(2)/(3)/(6) motion to dismiss — unsurprising, since Altice USA is Delaware-incorporated and the patents plausibly state a claim.
• No § 1404(a) transfer motion to S.D.N.Y. (Altice's Bethpage, NY headquarters) or E.D.N.Y.
• No motion to stay pending IPR — and no IPR existed to stay for (see § 7 below).
• No motion to sever the three patents or the four companion cases.
• No summary judgment motion of any kind.
• No motion for judgment on the pleadings, no § 101 motion — a real missed opportunity for the defense, since the '077 (a 2000-era voice/button-mode remote control) and '867 (generic real-time wireless control) are facially vulnerable to Alice/Bilski challenges and to § 103 art (Unified's own crowdsourcing on the '867 identified substantial prior art).
• No motion for a protective order, no ESI order, no scheduling order — the case never reached the point where Judge Andrews would have entered his standard Rule 16 scheduling order.

The only motion filed at all was D.I. 7, Cedar Lane's own unopposed extension motion, which is a scheduling accommodation rather than a motion "of substance."

3. Claim construction (Markman)

The case never reached claim construction. No joint claim construction statement, no Markman briefing, no Markman hearing, no claim construction order. Judge Andrews' chambers never construed a single term of the '077, '475, or '867. The practical consequence: no term of any of the three patents has been construed in this case, so any later assertion of these patents — against Altice or anyone else — starts from a blank construction record. (For context on why this matters, Cedar Lane's campaign elsewhere did produce some claim-construction activity, but none of it is binding or even persuasive-by-estoppel here.)

4. Discovery milestones

None. No Rule 26(f) conference, no joint discovery plan, no initial disclosures, no interrogatories, no document production, no depositions, no expert reports, no third-party subpoenas. The docket shows no protective order — which means no confidentiality regime exists that could later be invoked to shield anything produced in this case.

5. Trial events, verdict, post-trial motions

None. No trial date was ever set. No verdict. No JMOL, no Rule 59 new-trial motion, no Rule 54(d) bill of costs, no § 285 fee motion, no appeal to the Federal Circuit. There is accordingly no Federal Circuit authority arising from this case, and no district-court opinion to cite — the case has never appeared in F. Supp. 3d or F.4th.

6. Disposition and present posture

Disposition: voluntary dismissal without prejudice, effective 2022-06-21, closed 2022-06-22 (D.I. 8; text entry).

Three legal points about this disposition matter more than the procedural label:

1. It was an as-of-right dismissal, not a court-approved one. D.I. 8 is captioned "NOTICE of Voluntary Dismissal," and the

Counsel of Record for Plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.

Short answer

This case has exactly one attorney of record for the plaintiff: David W. deBruin, then of Gawthrop Greenwood, PC (Wilmington, Delaware office). Every filing in the case — the complaint, the Rule 7.1 disclosure, the extension motion, and the notice of voluntary dismissal — is ECF-stamped "(deBruin, David)." No other attorney ever entered an appearance for Cedar Lane on this docket, no pro hac vice motion was filed, and no in-house lawyer appeared. The case closed before any defendant-side counsel appeared either.

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The single appearance

Docket evidence. D.I. 1 (Complaint, 2022-04-12), D.I. 3 (Rule 7.1 Disclosure Statement), D.I. 7 (Unopposed Motion to Extend Time to Respond, 2022-04-22) and D.I. 8 (Notice of Voluntary Dismissal, 2022-06-21) all carry the deBruin filer stamp. See Patexia docket for 1:22-cv-00470 and DocketBird docket sheet. The signature-block form used across the firm's Cedar Lane filings is "GAWTHROP GREENWOOD, PC /s/ David W. deBruin / David W. deBruin (No. 4846)," as reflected in the firm's other D. Del. Cedar Lane papers (e.g., gov.uscourts.ded.76772, D.I. 7 and 11).

Who did not appear (and why it matters)

• Isaac Rabicoff / Rabicoff Law LLC (Chicago) — Cedar Lane's national patent-assertion counsel, who files its W.D. Tex., E.D. Tex., N.D. Cal., S.D.N.Y. and N.D. Ill. complaints and is named on hundreds of Cedar Lane dockets — never entered an appearance in 1:22-cv-00470. No notice of appearance, no pro hac vice motion, no signature on any of the nine docket entries. This is consistent with Cedar Lane's Delaware practice of routing D. Del. filings through a Delaware-admitted local firm, but the consequence here is that Rabicoff is not counsel of record in this case and should not be described as such. (For contrast, Rabicoff's record and the N.D. Cal. disciplinary referral in In re Isaac Rabicoff, No. 20-mc-80206-JD, arise from Cedar Lane v. Blackmagic Design, No. 3:20-cv-01302-VC — a California case, not this one.)
• No in-house counsel. Cedar Lane is a Canadian NPE with no legal department appearing on any filing.
• No defense-side appearance. Altice USA never filed an answer, Rule 12 motion, or notice of appearance; there is no Altice counsel to identify from this docket, and I did not locate a public appearance by Altice's outside counsel in this case.

Firm affiliation caveat (please keep this in mind)

At the time of this case (April–June 2022), deBruin signed as Gawthrop Greenwood, PC. Law360's attorney profile and third-party attorney databases now list him at Napoli Shkolnik PLLC in Wilmington (ddebruin@napolilaw.com), and his Cedar Lane/BE Labs Delaware dockets continue into late 2022 (Law360 profile). I could not pin the exact date of the Gawthrop Greenwood → Napoli Shkolnik transition from accessible sources, so I would not assert that he was at Napoli Shkolnik during this case. For this case the correct attribution is Gawthrop Greenwood.

Verification gaps

• I could not open the full text of D.I. 1 (the nine-page complaint PDF) through a free RECAP mirror, so I cannot confirm whether the complaint's caption or signature block named any additional attorney (for example, a Rabicoff Law LLC "of counsel" line) beyond the ECF filer. The docket is unambiguous that no second attorney was noticed.
• If precise confirmation is needed, the authoritative check is the PACER docket sheet for No. 1:22-cv-00470-RGA, filtering the "Attorneys" pane — but given the case closed 2022-06-22 with nine entries, the RECAP-derived dockets above are almost certainly complete.
• Secondary press corroboration that Cedar Lane's contemporaneous Delaware suits were handled by Gawthrop Greenwood: Law Street Media's coverage of Cedar Lane v. Sonos (D. Del., '867 patent) states "Cedar Lane Technologies is represented by Gawthrop Greenwood PC" (Law Street Media).

Bottom line for the counsel-of-record question

One name, one firm, one role: David W. deBruin, Gawthrop Greenwood, PC (Wilmington, DE) — lead and sole counsel of record for Cedar Lane, acting as Delaware local counsel; no co-counsel, no pro hac vice counsel, and no in-house attorney ever appeared.

I'll research this. Key question going in: the previously generated sections indicate Altice never answered or entered a substantive appearance, so I need to verify whether any defense counsel ever appeared of record — and, if not, whether Altice's counsel can be identified from related Cedar Lane matters.

Counsel of record — Cedar Lane Techs., Inc. v. Altice USA, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-00470-RGA (D. Del.)

Bottom line

Altice USA never entered an appearance in this case, and no attorney — local, national, or in-house — appears on the docket on the defense side. There is no Notice of Attorney Appearance, no pro hac vice motion, no Rule 12 motion, no answer, and no counterclaim. The only attorney signature anywhere on the nine-entry docket belongs to Cedar Lane's Delaware counsel, David W. deBruin. Because the case was resolved by a plaintiff-filed Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) notice of dismissal one day after the extended answer deadline (and before any responsive pleading was served), Altice had no procedural occasion to appear of record — and did not.

This is a "no defense counsel of record" answer, not a missing-data answer. I checked the full docket text on Patexia and DocketBird, both of which reproduce every entry; there is no defense-side filing of any kind.

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1. The only counsel of record: plaintiff's side

For completeness, Cedar Lane's Delaware counsel in these filings appears without any co-counsel pro hac vice entry in this case — consistent with a template complaint filed and then withdrawn before any contested briefing (CourtListener RECAP entry, D.I. 1).

2. Defense side: nothing of record

Corroborating docket facts:

• D.I. 6 (04/19/2022) — summons returned executed; Altice served 2022-04-14, answer due 2022-05-05.
• D.I. 7 (04/22/2022) — the Unopposed Motion to Extend Time to Respond to Complaint was filed by Cedar Lane, not by Altice, and was captioned as unopposed; Judge Andrews so-ordered it the same day, resetting the answer to 2022-06-20.
• D.I. 8 (06/21/2022) — Notice of Voluntary Dismissal "as to Altice USA," signed by deBruin for plaintiff.
• No D.I. 10 or later appears, i.e., no post-dismissal appearance, no fee motion, no sanctions motion against defense counsel.

The same pattern holds across the whole four-case wave before Judge Andrews: in the Cox Communications companion (1:22-cv-00471), UniCourt's party/attorney extract lists only "Plaintiff Attorney: David W. deBruin" — no Cox counsel — and the unopposed extension there was likewise filed by Cedar Lane (UniCourt; Patexia Cox docket). Cedar Lane appears to have run a standing practice of moving in its own name for a first extension in each new case, which is how these matters bought ~60–70 days before dismissal without any defense appearance.

3. Who was actually handling Altice's response — inference, not record

The "unopposed" characterization in D.I. 7 implies plaintiff's counsel had contact with someone authorized to speak for Altice, but no name is disclosed by any filed document, and I will not guess one. In Delaware practice, a defendant (or its insurer/GCD) will often agree to a first extension through its usual national counsel before local counsel is engaged; that conversation leaves no docket trace. Whether that happened here is unknown. Note also that an extension motion filed by the plaintiff avoids the need for the defendant to retain Delaware counsel just to sign a stipulation — which fits the absence of any appearance.

Two related non-appearances worth stating explicitly: (a) there were no pro hac vice motions for Altice, which is the normal vehicle for out-of-state patent defense counsel in D. Del.; and (b) there is no indication of any sealed filing on this docket that could have concealed an appearance — the docket is nine public entries.

4. Altice's known patent litigation counsel in other matters (context only — not of record here)

Because the task is to identify defense counsel, it's useful to distinguish the people who do represent Altice in patent matters from those who represented it here (nobody). These are verified engagements, but each post-dates or is unrelated to 1:22-cv-00470 and none is counsel of record in this case:

Nothing ties any of these firms to Cedar Lane's 2022 Delaware suit.

5. Contradiction to flag against existing sections

The Korean KOTRA/IPIC dispute database entry for this case describes the defendant as "Altice USA Inc (룩셈부르크 / 외국기업)" — i.e., a Luxembourg foreign company (KOTRA record). That conflicts with the case overview's accurate description of Altice USA, Inc. as a Delaware-incorporated U.S. cable operator headquartered in Bethpage, New York (with the Luxembourg entity being the parent, Altice Europe/Altice Group). The metadata's party name and the venue rationale (Delaware incorporation) should control; the KOTRA field appears to conflate the parent with the subsidiary. This matters for the counsel question only indirectly: Altice USA's Delaware incorporation is precisely why no transfer/local-counsel fight ever materialized, and why the case could be filed and dismissed on a template.

6. Sourcing and gaps

• Verified: the complete docket text (nine entries) and the absence of any defense appearance (Patexia, DocketBird, CourtListener RECAP, UniCourt); the plaintiff-side signatory on every filing; the parallel no-appearance pattern in the Cox companion.
• Not verified / would need PACER or a party:
  • Whether Altice's in-house legal department or an insurer retained counsel behind the scenes to negotiate the "unopposed" extension, and who that person was.
  • David W. deBruin's firm of record as of April–June 2022 (the docket text does not print a firm block; the Flaster Greenberg attribution comes from secondary profiles, not the filings themselves).
  • Whether Altice's D. Del. registered agent or local counsel of choice in 2022 was any particular Wilmington firm.
• Caveat: I could not access PACER directly; all docket text is RECAP-derived secondary reproduction, though three independent mirrors agree entry-for-entry. If a Notice of Appearance was ever filed and later withdrawn such that it dropped from these mirrors, that would not be visible here — but no such entry appears in the docket text on any of the four mirrors reviewed, and the clerk's "CASE CLOSED per D.I. 8" entry (06/22/2022) is consistent with a docket that ended before any defense participation.

Practical takeaway for a counsel table: for this case, the defense column is