Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Motorola Solutions, Inc.

I'll research this case systematically, starting with the docket and party background.

Key finding: the case was voluntarily dismissed ~6 weeks after filing. Let me dig into the complaint details, the patent's history, and Cedar Lane's broader campaign.

Now let me pin down the accused products in the complaint and any IPR/PTAB history for the '527 patent.

Case Overview: Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Motorola Solutions, Inc., No. 6:22-cv-01111 (W.D. Tex.)

The parties. Plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is a Canadian non-practicing entity — incorporated in Nelson, British Columbia in April 2019 — whose president, Greg Benoit, is a lawyer who describes his business as "helping patent owners monetize their patents." Cedar Lane does not make or sell anything; its portfolio (roughly 190+ U.S. patents by late 2022, the large majority acquired and most already expired) was assembled largely from Intellectual Ventures divestitures, and its enforcement is handled almost exclusively by Isaac Rabicoff of Rabicoff Law LLC, who filed this complaint along with the Rule 7 corporate disclosure (Dkts. 2–3). Cedar Lane was the single most prolific patent plaintiff in the United States in 2021 (per Lex Machina's 2022 report) and reportedly filed 300+ suits in 2019–2022 with a ~96–98% settlement rate and termination times averaging roughly 77–90 days; it has essentially never taken a case to trial. Defendant Motorola Solutions, Inc. is the Chicago-based operating company spun off from Motorola Inc. in 2011 — land mobile radio systems, dispatch/command-center software, body cameras (WatchGuard), and video security and access control (Avigilon, acquired 2018). Notably, Motorola Solutions is not merely a defendant in this space: it was the lead complainant in ITC Inv. No. 337-TA-1281 against Verkada over video-security patents (U.S. 7,868,912, 10,726,312, 8,508,607), a case in which the asserted patents were formally transferred to Motorola Solutions in December 2021 (87 Fed. Reg. 4658, Jan. 28, 2022). Motorola was also a repeat Cedar Lane target — Cedar Lane previously sued it in N.D. Ill., No. 1:20-cv-03600 (assigned to Judge Andrea R. Wood), and voluntarily dismissed that case in 2020.

The patent and accused technology. The patent identified in the case metadata is U.S. Patent No. 6,473,527, "Module and method for interfacing analog/digital converting means and JPEG compression means" — inventor Wang Chia-Ying, originally assigned to Mustek Systems Inc. of Taiwan, filed June 1, 1999, issued October 29, 2002, and expired June 1, 2019. Technically, it claims an interface module sitting between an A/D converter and a JPEG compressor that reads a small number of image lines into a buffer whose capacity matches the JPEG engine's built-in memory, then streams compression-sized blocks (e.g., 8×8 pixels) directly to the compressor — eliminating a discrete external RAM chip in digital cameras and scanners. Claim 1 is drafted in means-plus-function form ("read control means," "memory means," "output control means"), so its scope is confined to the structure disclosed in Figure 2 (read control device 22, memory 24, output control device 23) plus equivalents — a significant infringement vulnerability. Cedar Lane's complaints in this campaign typically bundled the '527 with U.S. 6,972,790 and U.S. 8,537,242 (both "Host interface for imaging arrays"; the '790 expired August 1, 2023, and the '242 derives from a 2005 continuation), and both Stanford's NPE Litigation Database and a same-week IPWatchdog roundup index this Motorola case under multiple patents from that family. Caveat: I could not retrieve the complaint or its Exhibit 4/5 claim charts (the filed complaint is only 8 pages, with the substantive infringement charts incorporated by reference and, in parallel Cedar Lane cases, omitted from the public filing). The specific Motorola/Avigilon products accused are therefore not verified; given the patents' subject matter and Motorola's Avigilon/WatchGuard camera lines, image-processing cameras are the plausible target, but that is inference, not a sourced fact.

Procedural posture, venue, and why the case matters. Filed October 26, 2022 in the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas and assigned to Judge Alan D. Albright "due to related cases" (the docket expressly reflects a related-case assignment, Dkt. 6) — significant because by that point Waco patent filings were no longer automatically routed to Albright following the district's mid-2022 random-assignment change; the related-case hook kept this one with him. The case never reached contention: Motorola obtained an agreed extension of its answer deadline to December 27, 2022 (Dkt. 8, filed Nov. 21), and on December 7, 2022 Cedar Lane filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal (Dkt. 9), with the PTO report following the same day (Dkt. 10). The case was over roughly six weeks after filing — no answer, no Rule 12 motion, no transfer motion, no Markman proceeding, no IPR petition. Because the '527 expired in June 2019, Cedar Lane could only have sought back damages for the six years preceding suit (35 U.S.C. § 286), i.e., conduct from roughly October 2016 to June 2019, with no possibility of injunctive relief — a structural feature of Cedar Lane's late-stage monetization of expiring and expired IV-derived assets. Its notability is therefore threefold: (1) it is a textbook data point in the mass-filing/settlement-mill NPE model — high volume, de minimis per-defendant settlements, near-zero substantive adjudication, and a dismissal-before-pleading pattern that leaves no public merits record; (2) it illustrates venue strategy in W.D. Tex. during the post-random-assignment, related-case-carve-out period that drew sustained criticism from defense bar and Congress; and (3) it is a rare instance of a large, patent-asserting operating company (Motorola Solutions, itself an ITC complainant over video-security patents) being targeted on expiring imaging patents — a defensive cost-of-doing-business dynamic rather than a market-exclusion fight. On IPR linkage: no PTAB proceeding was ever instituted against the '527 in connection with this case, and the dismissal foreclosed any. Secondary reporting indicates Unified Patents filed one IPR in October 2019 challenging a Cedar Lane patent and prevailed, but I could not independently verify which Cedar Lane patent that was; I found no IPR against the '527 itself.

Sourcing notes and unverified points. Party identities, filing date, judge, docket entries (Dkts. 1–10), and the voluntary dismissal are grounded in the Justia/Patexia docket records and Stanford's NPE Litigation Database (case 268981). Patent bibliographic data for the '527 (Mustek Systems, Wang Chia-Ying, 1999 filing, 2002 issuance, 2019 expiry) comes from secondary compilations and complaint-analysis sources rather than a USPTO/Google Patents record I pulled directly, so treat the exact expiry date as highly likely but not primary-source confirmed. Cedar Lane's filing volumes, settlement rates, and the 2020 N.D. Cal. sanctions decision against Cedar Lane and Rabicoff (Cedar Lane Techs. v. Blackmagic Design, Judge Vince Chhabria) are drawn from IAM

Bottom line up front

There is far less to this case than the checklist implies: Cedar Lane Technologies v. Motorola Solutions, 6:22-cv-01111 (W.D. Tex.) was filed on 2022-10-26 and was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff 42 days later, on 2022-12-07, before Motorola ever answered, moved, or counterclaimed. No answer, no Rule 12 motion, no transfer or stay motion, no Markman, no discovery, no trial, no JMOL/fees motion, no appeal. The case was one case in a mass-filing campaign, and it resolved the way almost all of that campaign's cases resolved — by early voluntary dismissal following an agreed extension of the defendant's response deadline.

Everything below is organized in the chronology you asked for, with the null results flagged explicitly rather than papered over.

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1. Case snapshot

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2. Chronological developments

(a) Filing and initial pleadings — 2022-10-26

• 2022-10-26 — Complaint (Dkt. 1). Jury-demanded § 271 infringement complaint with Exhibits 1–6 plus civil cover sheet. The six exhibits are consistent with Cedar Lane's standard W.D. Tex. template of three patents plus three claim charts (cf. the identical 6-exhibit structure in its 2019 S.D. Fla. complaint, which attached patents as Exs. 1–3 and claim charts as Exs. 4–6). Cedar Lane's contemporaneous complaints in the same wave asserted the '527, '790 and '242 patents.
• 2022-10-26 — Related-case notice (Dkt. 6), Rule 7.1 disclosure (Dkt. 3), AO 120 (Dkt. 5); summons issued 2022-10-27 (Dkt. 7).
• 2022-10-26 — Assignment to Judge Albright "due to related cases," i.e., the dozens of other Cedar Lane complaints filed the same day in Waco (Report on the Filing roundup, IPWatchdog, 2022-11-03).

Answer / counterclaims: none. The only defense-side activity reflected on the docket is:

• 2022-11-21 — Notice of Agreed Extension (Dkt. 8), extending Motorola's deadline to answer, move, or otherwise respond from the original date to 2022-12-27. Clerk reset the deadline accordingly. That extension is the last substantive event before dismissal; Motorola's answer date never arrived.

(b) Pre-trial motions of substance

None filed and none decided. No Rule 12(b)(2)/(3)/(6) motion, no § 1404(a) transfer motion (notable, given Motorola's Delaware and Northern District of Illinois presence and the prior N.D. Ill. suit — a transfer fight was the likeliest defense move had the case proceeded), no motion to stay pending IPR, no § 101 motion, no summary-judgment practice. The case never reached a scheduling order, so no Markman or SJ deadlines existed.

(c) Claim construction

No Markman. No claim construction order, no joint claim construction statement, no Albright-format briefing. The zero-to-Markman clock never started.

(d) Discovery milestones

None. No Rule 26(f) conference, no discovery order, no infringement or invalidity contentions, no ESI or source-code protocol.

(e) Trial, verdict, post-trial motions

None. No trial setting, no verdict, no JMOL, no new-trial motion, no § 285 fee motion.

(f) Final disposition — 2022-12-07 voluntary dismissal

• 2022-12-07 — Notice of Voluntary Dismissal (Dkt. 9), with a proposed order attached, filed by Rabicoff.
• 2022-12-07 — AO 120 Report on Patent sent to the USPTO (Dkt. 10), which the clerk's office generates on termination.
• No contested dismissal motion, no order resolving one on the public docket. Because the notice was filed before Motorola served an answer or moved for summary judgment, a Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) notice operates without any court order. The docket contains no injunction, no judgment, no Rule 54(b) certification, and no retention of jurisdiction to enforce a settlement.
• Sourcing caveat: the Justia/Patexia docket snapshots (Patexia) show Dkt. 9 as "(0)" pages and do not display the dismissal text. I could not verify from the public record whether the dismissal was expressly with or without prejudice, or whether any payment was made. In Cedar Lane's one prior Motorola suit (below) the dismissal was expressly without prejudice; and Cedar Lane's campaign-wide pattern was dismissal without prejudice after payment. But do not state as fact that consideration changed hands here — the record does not disclose it.

(g) Appeal

None. No notice of appeal; the Federal Circuit has no docket activity for this case.

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3. The asserted patent: US 6,473,527

• Subject matter: an interface module/method for taking digital image data from an A-to-D converter, buffering a like number of image lines as the JPEG compression device's internal memory, and streaming JPEG-sized image blocks directly to the compressor without an intermediate frame buffer. Claim 1 is an apparatus claim; the family spawned US 6,972,790 and US 8,537,242 ("Host interface for imaging arrays").
• Provenance: Cedar Lane is a Canadian NPE founded by Greg Benoit; the '527 came out of the Intellectual Ventures portfolio sell-off (IPWatchdog tagged this 2022-10-26 filing wave "[IV selloff]").
• Terminal status: the '527 is expired. The Shenzhen IP Protection Center's risk warning on the parallel Cedar Lane filing (6:22-cv-01079, ~2022-10-20) expressly describes US 6,473,527 as 已失效 ("no longer in force"). Consequence: no injunctive relief was realistically available (cf. eBay), and recovery was capped by the six-year lookback in 35 U.S.C. § 286 — i.e., damages could only reach acts from roughly 2016-10-26 forward. That materially depressed settlement value and is the single most important economic fact about this suit.
• Discrepancy to flag: IPWatchdog's filing table for 6:22-cv-01111 lists US 8,537,242 as the patent, and the Stanford NPE litigation database indexes this case under both '527 and '790. The case metadata supplied to me (and the Stanford '527 page) places '527 in this case. The most likely explanation is that the complaint asserted the '527 alongside '790/'242 (consistent with the 6-exhibit structure) and secondary databases captured different members of the family. I have not been able to pull the Dkt. 1 exhibit captions themselves; treat "which of the three family patents were actually charted" as unresolved.

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4. Parallel PTAB proceedings

No IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding on US 6,473,527 affecting this case was located. I searched PTAB-related coverage and found no petition, institution decision, or FWD naming the '527 against Cedar Lane. Two structural reasons:

1. The '527 issued in 2002 from a 1990s-priority application, so by 2022 it was near or past end-of-term; the ROI on an IPR (fees plus 12–18 months) against a patent with a § 286-limited damages tail and no injunction exposure was poor.
2. The case itself died in six weeks. There was no stay motion to seek, no IPR-filing incentive created by litigation pressure, and no estoppel consequence under § 315(e).

To be clear about the limits of this finding: PTAB dockets are searchable but I did not exhaustively walk every Cedar Lane-related IPR; I found no evidence of one, which is different from proving a negative. Also note the general backdrop in 2022: the Board was issuing almost no § 314(a) discretionary denials (per IPWatchdog's same roundup), so the absence of PTAB activity is about economics, not about the Board being unavailable.

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5. Related Motorola litigation and the campaign context (why this case looks like it does)

Prior suit — Cedar Lane Techs. v. Motorola Solutions Inc., No. 1:20-cv-03600 (N.D. Ill., Judge Andrea R. Wood):

• 2020-06-19 — Complaint asserting seven patents, including US 6,473,527 and US 8,537,242, plus 6,516,147, 6,566,805, 6,972,774, 6,972,790, 7,292,261.
• 2020-07-10 — First Amended Complaint naming Motorola Mobility LLC (Dkt. 6); same day, Notice of Voluntary Dismissal (Dkt. 7).
• 2020-07-10 — Minute entry (Dkt. 9): dismissed without prejudice under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i); case terminated. Motorola never answered.

The 2022 wave: on 2022-10-26 Cedar Lane filed a large tranche of complaints — in W.D. Tex. (6:22-cv-01079 through the -01111/-01232/-01307 range) and in D. Del. (1:22-cv-01402 to -01411) — asserting the '527/'790/'242 package against camera-, drone-, and video-device defendants. In D. Del., Judge Richard G. Andrews's courtroom saw a string of near-identical voluntary dismissals within 2–4 months: Skydio (dismissed 2023-02-10), Yi Technologies (2023-03-14), Watts Innovations (with prejudice, 2023-04-11), Video Network Security (2023-05-16). Cedar Lane also brought in David W. deBruin and Napoli Shkolnik as later campaign counsel.

The campaign's economics: Cedar Lane was the single most prolific patent plaintiff in the U.S. in 2021 and among the top filers of 2022; its president Greg Benoit told IAM it had achieved a 96% settlement rate among terminated cases, with a median time-to-termination of roughly 77 days against Shenzhen-based defendants. (IAM, "Examining the practice of Cedar Lane Technologies – America's top-filing NPE," 2023-03-06)

**Read against that baseline, 6:22-cv-01111 is a textbook "license-then-dismiss"

I'll research the docket and counsel of record for this case.

Let me verify the full docket and counsel details.

Counsel of Record for Plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.

Bottom line

The docket in Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. Motorola Solutions, Inc., No. 6:22-cv-01111-ADA (W.D. Tex.) is ten entries long and closed. Exactly one attorney ever appeared for the plaintiff: Isaac P. Rabicoff of Rabicoff Law LLC. No local counsel, no of-counsel, no second chair, and no in-house counsel appears anywhere on the docket. Nothing in this case is sealed — the entire record (complaint, appearance, disclosure statement, AO 120, related-case notice, summons, extension notice, voluntary dismissal) is public, which is why the negative finding on additional counsel is reliable rather than merely an absence of search results.

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The single attorney of record

Procedural context that bears on the counsel question

• Filed 10/26/2022, assigned to Judge Alan D. Albright "due to related cases" (the related-case notice, Doc. 6, ties this to the Cedar Lane wave of W.D. Tex. filings).
• Defendant never answered and never appeared in the docket as captured. Plaintiff itself filed the agreed extension to 12/27/2022 (Doc. 8, 11/21/2022).
• Case terminated 12/7/2022 on Cedar Lane's own Notice of Voluntary Dismissal (Doc. 9), with the AO 120 report to the USPTO entered as Doc. 10. No motion to dismiss, no Markman, no IPR was ever reached.
• No pro hac vice motion appears on this docket — consistent with Rabicoff filing directly in W.D. Tex. in this period rather than seeking admission, the precise practice that drew the N.D. Cal. referral.

Where I'd flag uncertainty

1. No local counsel of record. Cedar Lane's W.D. Tex. filings in 2022 typically went in without Waco/Austin local counsel, and the docket here confirms it. If you need to rule out a non-appearing "behind the scenes" firm, that would only appear in engagement materials, not the record.
2. In-house counsel. Cedar Lane is a Canadian NPE (560 Baker Street, Suite 1, Nelson, BC) with no in-house lawyer identified in any filing I located. I found no evidence of one; I would not assert one exists.
3. Kenneth Matuszewski (Rabicoff Law LLC, Reg. No. 74,791) appears as backup counsel alongside Rabicoff in other matters (e.g., Mirror Imaging PTAB proceedings) but did not enter an appearance in this case and should not be listed as counsel here.
4. Patent-at-issue discrepancy worth a footnote: the case metadata supplied lists only US 6,473,527, and the Stanford NPE database does associate '527 with this case number. However, IPWatchdog's Nov. 3, 2022 filings roundup lists US 8,537,242 as the patent asserted in 6:22-cv-01111, and Stanford's '790 database also lists this case. The complaint (Doc. 1, 8 pp. with 6 exhibits) is the controlling source; because the case was dismissed before any substantive ruling, no court document resolves which patent(s) were pled. This does not affect the counsel identification but is worth verifying against the complaint PDF if the patent scope matters to your analysis.

I'll research the docket and counsel of record for Motorola Solutions in this case.

The docket shows dismissal before any defense appearance. Let me verify with CourtListener/PACER and check the related earlier Cedar Lane v. Motorola case for defense counsel context.

Let me pull the CourtListener RECAP docket directly and check whether Cedar Lane re-filed against Motorola later.

Bottom line

There is no counsel of record for Motorola Solutions in this case — none ever appeared. The case was voluntarily dismissed by Cedar Lane on December 7, 2022, roughly six weeks after filing and before Motorola filed any answer, motion, or Rule 7.1 disclosure statement. The docket contains no notice of appearance, no pro hac vice motion, no answer, and no corporate disclosure by the defendant. So there is no defense attorney roster to name — and I will not manufacture one.

What the docket actually shows

Docket: Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. Motorola Solutions, Inc., No. 6:22-cv-01111 (W.D. Tex., Judge Alan D. Albright), filed Oct. 26, 2022. (Justia docket; Patexia document list)

Key points for your counsel analysis:

1. No defense appearance at all. Not a single docket entry carries a defendant-side filer. Motorola never entered counsel, never sought a pro hac vice admission, and never filed the Local Rule CV-7 / Rule 7.1 disclosure that W.D. Tex. requires on appearance.
2. Doc. 8 is the only trace of defense-side activity — and it was filed by plaintiff's counsel, captioned as an "agreed" extension. That signals plaintiff's counsel was in contact with Motorola's litigation counsel or in-house legal department (typically how such extensions are obtained), but the agreement was memorialized without any appearance on the record. No name appears anywhere in the docket for Motorola's side. Any specific attorney name attached to that negotiation would be an inference, not a sourced fact.
3. Dismissal as of right. Because no answer or motion to dismiss had been filed, Cedar Lane could dismiss unilaterally under Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i) without a court order (the notice attached a proposed order, per the docket). The dismissal terminated the case on Dec. 7, 2022.

Prior related case — same result

Cedar Lane previously sued Motorola over the same patent family (including US 6,473,527, along with 6,516,147, 6,566,805, 6,972,774, 6,972,790, 7,292,261, 8,537,242) in Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. Motorola Solutions Inc. et al., No. 1:20-cv-03600 (N.D. Ill., Judge Andrea R. Wood), filed June 19, 2020. That case also ended by plaintiff's notice of voluntary dismissal, with the court's minute order dismissing without prejudice and terminating the case. No Motorola-side attorney appearance is recorded in that docket either — the only appearance of record is plaintiff's counsel Isaac Philip Rabicoff. (UniCourt case page; Unified Patents docket)

Context worth flagging for the case file

• Procedural posture is the story here, not counsel: two suits against Motorola over this family, both dismissed on plaintiff's own motion before any defense response — consistent with a pre-suit or early licensing resolution rather than contested litigation. That inference is mine, not a documented finding; the docket does not state a reason for dismissal.
• Patent-identification discrepancy. Your case summary lists only US 6,473,527 for 6:22-cv-01111. The Stanford NPE Litigation Database does associate 6,473,527 with this case number (NPE database, patent 6,473,527), but IPWatchdog's Nov. 3, 2022 new-filings roundup lists 8,537,242 as the patent for 6:22-cv-01111 (IPWatchdog). Cedar Lane routinely pleaded 5–10 patents per complaint from this portfolio, so the complaint (Doc. 1, exhibits 1–6) likely asserts several. Worth pulling Doc. 1 to confirm.
• No IPR activity to report on Motorola's behalf. Since the case died pre-answer, there is no PTAB petition traceable to this dispute. I found no IPR challenging 6,473,527 filed by Motorola; if you need that confirmed, a PTAB docket search should be run directly before relying on it.

If you need to name defense counsel anyway

Options, in order of reliability:

1. Pull Doc. 8 from PACER ($3.00). Agreed-extension notices sometimes list defense counsel in the certificate of service or in the body ("Pursuant to agreement with counsel for Defendant…"). That is the single most likely place a name appears in this record.
2. Check Doc. 9's certificate of service — the voluntary dismissal notice may identify who was served on the defense side.
3. Look to contemporaneous Cedar Lane cases in W.D. Tex. (e.g., 6:22-cv-01307 v. Zenitel Group, the other 6,473,527 case filed days after this one) to see which firms handled Cedar Lane's W.D. Tex. defense work in that window. That establishes the pool of likely defense firms but does not establish who represented Motorola — do not attribute it to Motorola without a document.
4. Motorola's in-house function is the Motorola Solutions Law Department (Chicago HQ). I found no sourced public record identifying a specific in-house attorney on this matter, so I am not naming one.

To be explicit about the limits of this answer: I have relied on the Justia/Patexia reproduction of the docket (both note the docket was last retrieved in December 2022) rather than a live PACER pull today. A live PACER docket report for 6:22-cv-01111 is the appropriate final verification, though given the case closed in December 2022 with the entry of the PTO report, it is highly unlikely any defense appearance has been added since.