Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. T-Mobile USA, Inc.

I'll research this case across dockets, PTAB records, and trade press.

Case Overview: Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. T-Mobile USA, Inc., No. 6:20-cv-00988 (W.D. Tex.)

The parties. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is a Canadian entity with a stated principal place of business in Nelson, British Columbia (see, e.g., Cedar Lane's complaint in Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. Alps Alpine N. Am., Inc., No. 2:23-cv-0001 (W.D. Wash.)). It is a classic non-practicing entity: it does not make or sell products, but holds a large portfolio of late-1990s/early-2000s media, imaging, and user-interface patents acquired from operating companies and prior aggregators. DISH Network's SEC disclosures describe Cedar Lane flatly as "a non-practicing entity that has filed more than 75 patent infringement lawsuits," and RPX has traced the asserted family's chain of title (original assignee → Harman → an Intellectual Ventures affiliate → Cedar Lane's supplier AVInnov → Cedar Lane). Cedar Lane's litigation is handled on a high-volume, form-complaint model by Isaac Rabicoff of Rabicoff Law LLC. T-Mobile USA, Inc. is the operating wireless subsidiary of T-Mobile US, Inc. — a nationwide carrier whose exposure here runs through its consumer software, apps, and media/streaming features rather than through any manufacture of the patented hardware.

The patent and the accused technology. The sole patent identified in the case metadata is U.S. Patent No. 6,721,489, "Play list manager," filed March 8, 2000, issued April 13, 2004, listing Daniel Benyamin, Dannie C. Lau, and Brendan T. Dowling as inventors and originally assigned to PhatNoise, Inc. (a California maker of car-audio media managers later acquired by Harman). In one sentence: the '489 claims a system and method for creating and maintaining playlists in which a user defines criteria for a playlist and the system automatically tests newly encountered tracks against those criteria and adds the qualifying tracks — optionally applying pre-defined playlists' criteria across a library. That is a late-1990s digital-jukebox/portable-media concept, and Cedar Lane has asserted the same patent against streaming and pay-TV defendants in this period (LiveXLive, Dish, Charter, Frontier, Starz, Spotify). I was not able to verify from the sources available to me which specific T-Mobile product or feature the amended complaint accuses — the amended complaint (Doc. 8, filed 2020-11-02, 27 pages with 24 exhibits) is behind PACER/paywalled services, and secondary coverage of the T-Mobile docket is thin. Cedar Lane's contemporaneous campaign targeted "media casting, playlist management, and remote control features" of streaming services, so the accused instrumentality is most likely a T-Mobile app or media/playlist function, but that is inference, not verified fact. One technical point worth flagging: with a March 8, 2000 filing date and absent patent term adjustment, the '489's twenty-year term would have run out on or about March 8, 2020 — i.e., just before this suit was filed. I could not confirm the PTA figure on the face of the patent in this session, but if the term indeed expired in 2020, the case was necessarily a backward-looking damages case (six-year lookback under § 286) with no prospect of injunctive relief, which materially shapes settlement value.

Posture, venue, and why it matters. Filed 2020-10-20 in the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas and amended on 2020-11-02, the case landed in what was then the country's dominant patent venue. Waco patent cases in 2020 were assigned to Judge Alan D. Albright, the division's sole district judge and the architect of its expedited patent scheduling; the same is confirmed on the face of the parallel Cedar Lane/DISH case from the same week (Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. Dish Network L.L.C., No. 6:20-cv-00947, Doc. 20, order signed by "Judge Alan D Albright"). Venue mattered here in the familiar way: speed to trial and a plaintiff-friendly reputation drove filing volume — by one measure Albright received 97% of Waco patent cases in the seven months before the July 2022 randomization order (JD Supra analysis of Lex Machina data). The case itself resolved quickly and quietly: Cedar Lane filed a stipulation of dismissal on 2021-03-31 (Doc. 18), roughly five months after filing; I could not verify from available sources whether the dismissal was with or without prejudice or whether it followed a license, and the terms are not public. The most notable context is the campaign, not this docket. Cedar Lane's '489 family was one strand of a coordinated assertion program across streaming, pay-TV, and wireless defendants, and it drew a PTAB counterattack: Unified Patents, LLC v. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. produced a Feb. 12, 2021 final written decision holding the independent claim of U.S. Patent 7,173,177 — a sibling patent asserted in the same wave — unpatentable, with Unified represented by in-house counsel Michelle Callaghan and Roshan Mansinghani and outside counsel Husch Blackwell. The metadata's note that this case was "listed as related to Unified Patents v. Cedar Lane" reflects that defensive-challenge linkage, though Unified's challenges were PTAB proceedings, not district court actions, so there is no true consolidated "related case" in the Rule 42 sense. Cedar Lane's rapid-fire pattern is visible across the neighboring dockets: AT&T (No. 6:21-cv-00251, filed 2021-03-12, voluntarily dismissed six days later on 2021-03-18), Verizon (No. 6:22-cv-00043, dismissed 2022-02-09), and Dish (dismissed on stipulation 2021-03-11) — i.e., short-lived complaints used as licensing leverage rather than litigation carried to claim construction, much less trial.

Sourcing caveats. Party identities, filing/amendment dates, the Doc. 18 stipulation of dismissal, and the DISH/AT&T/Verizon parallels are grounded in docket-derived records (Patexia docket pages and Justia dockets). The '489 title, dates, original assignee, and claim scope come from Cedar Lane's own complaints and Patsnap/Google Patents bibliographic data, corroborated by RPX's chain-of-title reporting. The claim that the suit was assigned to Judge Albright is a strong inference from the 2020 Waco assignment practice and the confirmed assignment of the parallel DISH case, but I did not see the T-Mobile case's own assignment entry. The accused T-Mobile product, the dismissal's prejudice status, any settlement terms, and the '489's exact expiration (PTA) are unverified and should be confirmed against PACER and the patent's face before being relied on.

I'll research this case across dockets, PTAB records, and litigation reporting. Let me start with parallel searches.

The initial results are noisy. Let me pull the actual docket and search for PTAB challenges specific to the '489 patent.

I now have the complete district court docket (19 entries, terminating 2021-03-31). Let me dig into the specifics: which patents were asserted, the answer, PTAB activity on the '489, and what drove the dismissal.

Cedar Lane Techs. v. T-Mobile USA — Litigation Chronology and Outcome

Case No. 6:20-cv-00988 (W.D. Tex., Waco Div.) — Judge Alan D. Albright

Bottom line: This was a short, pleadings-only case. It was filed 2020‑10‑20, answered 2020‑12‑31, and ended by stipulated dismissal on 2021‑03‑31 — roughly five months after service and before the court ever entered a scheduling order. There was no motion to dismiss, no transfer motion, no stay motion, no Markman, no discovery of consequence, no summary judgment, and no trial or appeal. The '489 patent was never tested at the PTAB in any proceeding I could locate. The one PTAB event that matters to this campaign — the Federal Circuit-bound IPR on the sibling '177 patent — landed seven weeks before Cedar Lane dismissed this case.

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1. Pre-suit posture (context for the pleadings)

The '489 patent (U.S. 6,721,489 B1, issued 2004‑04‑13, PhatNoise, Inc. origin, ~March 2000 priority) is one of four former Intellectual Ventures assets — with the '194, '411, and '177 — that AVInnov LLC asserted, then assigned to Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. (a Canadian NPE based in Nelson, B.C.), which re-asserted them within about a month. See RPX, In a Matter of Months, Former IV Portfolio Bounces Off One NPE to Land in New Cedar Lane Complaints (2019‑11‑09), https://litigation.rpxcorp.com/news/59211. By the time of this suit, the '489 had already been asserted against Charter (2:19-cv-00368, E.D. Tex.), Frontier, Starz (1:19-cv-03189, D. Colo.), and others — this case was one node in a broad, cookie-cutter campaign, not bespoke litigation.

2. Filing and initial pleadings

I'll search multiple angles to find press coverage of this case.

Press coverage of Cedar Lane Technologies v. T-Mobile USA (6:20-cv-00988)

Bottom line: this docket generated almost no case-specific press. Searching the caption, the party names, the patent number, and the venue across general news and IP trade sources turned up no Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Law360, Ars Technica, The Verge, IPWatchdog, Patently-O, EFF Deeplinks, or JD Supra article about this suit. That is consistent with the docket itself: per the Patexia docket record, the case never went past the pleadings — T-Mobile answered on 2020-12-31 (Doc. 14) and Cedar Lane filed a stipulation of dismissal on 2021-03-31 (Doc. 18), with the required patent report sent to the USPTO on 2021-09-10 (Doc. 19). No outlet I found reported the dismissal, and no damages figure or settlement term was ever publicly reported. Coverage that does exist treats the case only as one data point inside a larger NPE campaign.

What the trade press did report is about the campaign, not the T-Mobile docket. On 2020-10-26, Mondaq published campaign analysis noting that Cedar Lane "continues to add defendants to its earliest, and largest, campaign, begun in May 2019 and quickly growing to hit almost 70 defendants with overlapping subsets of nearly 40 former Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) patents," and specifically listing U.S. Patent Nos. 6,502,194, 6,526,411 and 6,721,489 as the group "generally related to creating, managing, and storing playlists." That piece covered the October 2020 DISH, Disney, Deezer, LiveXLive and ViacomCBS filings but did not name T-Mobile, whose complaint was filed a week later. Separately, Seyfarth Shaw's "NPE Showcase" (republished on a secondary site) profiled Cedar Lane as "one of the more prolific NPEs in the patent enforcement market" and stated that "none of his cases have reached the trial stage," characterizing the campaign as "traditional patent-based nuisance litigation" aimed at "large amounts of minor settlements." IAM later reported (2025-04-15) that the NPE Patent Armory's principal "formerly operated Cedar Lane Technologies," framing Cedar Lane as a training ground for high-volume filing.

The one reported event touching the same patent family is the Unified Patents PTAB win. Unified Patents reported on 2021-02-12 that the PTAB issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. holding the asserted independent claim of U.S. Patent 7,173,177 unpatentable, and expressly named T-Mobile among the targets of that patent ("Spectrum (Charter Communications), T-Mobile, Disney, Dish Network, CBS Corp., and others"). That is the only press source I found that places T-Mobile inside this patent family in print. Case-level legal-press reporting on the '489 patent exists only for sibling suits: LawStreetMedia covered the 2020-10-13 Dish Network complaint listing the '489 among six asserted patents, and LawStreetMedia covered the LiveXLive complaint; neither discusses T-Mobile.

Where accounts go beyond, or diverge from, the court record: no outlet reported any T-Mobile-specific outcome, so any inference that the March 2021 dismissal reflected a paid settlement is unsupported by published reporting — the stipulation of dismissal and its terms are not reflected in any article I located. The most quoted "facts" about Cedar Lane come from adversary filings and opinion pieces rather than from adjudication: Dish's 2020 annual report told investors that "Cedar Lane Technologies is a non-practicing entity that has filed more than 75 patent infringement lawsuits," and Seyfarth's characterization of the campaign as nuisance litigation is advocacy-flavored commentary, not a finding in this case. Conversely, no source reports the amended complaint's apparent expansion of asserted patents (the docket text at Doc. 9 flags added "805, 790, 177, 261, 443, 242, and 264" patents), which means the press record is thinner than the docket even on the pleadings. I found no analyst estimates of damages exposure and no T-Mobile executive statement about the suit.

Sources

• Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. T-Mobile USA, Inc. > Related Cases
• NPE Showcase – Cedar Lane Technologies | Seyfarth Shaw LLP - Welcome to the first installment of "NPE Showcase", where we discuss high volume non-practicing entities (or as some call them "...
• Cedar Lane Technologies, Inc. | Patent Litigation Record - Cedar Lane Technologies, Inc. Patent litigation record
• 6473527 | NPE Litigation Database
• Case 1:20- cv- 00988- DAD- BAM Document 21 Filed 09/21/20 Page 1 of 2
• Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. The Walt Disney Company > Related Cases
• ...

  DGT-JO,1:06-cv-00988-DGT-JO,1:06-cv-01721-DGT-JO(Mitnick, Joel) (Entered: 06/29/2006)

• Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. - Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.
• News & Views
• Cedar Lane Technologies Inc
• 1:20-cv-03600 - Cedar Lane Technologies Inc v. Motorola Solutions Inc et al. - CIVIL DOCKET
• Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. TIAA-CREF Individual & Institutional Services, LLC (1:25-cv-09538), New York Southern District Court

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

Let me pull the full docket sheet and the complaint's signature block.

Counsel of Record for Plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. — No. 6:20-cv-00988 (W.D. Tex.)

Bottom line

The plaintiff-side record in this case is a one-lawyer show. Every plaintiff-side filing I could identify on the docket — the original complaint (Doc. 1), the amended complaint (Doc. 8, 2020-11-02), and the stipulation of dismissal (Doc. 18, 2021-03-31) — was submitted by (and bears the electronic signature of) Isaac Phillip Rabicoff of Rabicoff Law LLC. I found no local counsel, no second plaintiff-side firm, and no Cedar Lane in-house attorney appearing of record.

Verified appearances

Sources: docket-entry filer metadata for Docs. 1, 8, and 18 (Patexia docket for Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. T-Mobile USA, Inc., No. 6:20-cv-00988, https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Cedar-Lane-Technologies-Inc-v-T-Mobile-USA-Inc-id-[141280](/patent/141280)/documents); Shenzhen IP Protection Center risk alert (Oct. 2022), http://www.sziprs.org.cn/szipr/hwwq/jfydzd/content/post_839930.html; Cedar Lane Techs. Inc. v. Blackmagic Design Inc., No. 20-cv-01302-VC (N.D. Cal.), sanctions/referral order and standing committee report, https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/nevada/nvdce/3:2025cv00103/[173189](/patent/173189)/37/0.pdf; Va. State Bar public reprimand (Dec. 12, 2022), https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/nnuf8y7u8425t6dqhqgnp/Rabicoff-[121222](/patent/121222).pdf.

What I could not verify (stated explicitly rather than inferred)

• No pro hac vice motion or appearance order appears in the entries I could retrieve. Whether Rabicoff sought pro hac vice admission in W.D. Tex. (the W.D. Tex. docket would show a motion and an order) is unconfirmed; the Patexia document list I could reach is visibly incomplete (it surfaces only Docs. 1, 8, and 18 for the plaintiff). This matters because Rabicoff's N.D. Cal. sanctions order was premised on exactly this practice — the court found he "often does not even bother to seek pro hac vice admission or pay the required fee," but instead "settles or otherwise dismisses the suits" before it is detected — and this case was dismissed on stipulation roughly five months in.
• No local counsel identified. W.D. Tex. practice does not compel local counsel the way D. Del. (where Cedar Lane routinely used a Delaware firm, e.g., David deBruin, in its 2021 Delaware filings) or N.D. Cal. does. I found no appearance by a Texas firm on Cedar Lane's behalf in this docket; if one exists it did not surface in the records available to me and should be checked against the PACER attorney panel.
• No Cedar Lane in-house counsel. Cedar Lane is a Canadian NPE; nothing in the record suggests in-house counsel entered an appearance. Its founder, Greg Benoit, is described in third-party reporting as an attorney with NPE-litigation experience, but I found no evidence he appeared in this case — do not assume he did.
• No second chair / "of counsel" designation. Kenneth A. Matuszewski (Rabicoff Law LLC) appears as backup counsel in Rabicoff's PTAB filings and in some later Cedar Lane district court matters; I did not find him on this docket and cannot place him of record here.

Consistency check against the earlier sections

The docket data confirms, rather than contradicts, the prior narrative: Doc. 8 carries 24 numbered exhibits (with sub-exhibits 13.1/13.2, 18.1/18.2, 19.1/19.2, 23.1/23.2), matching the "27 pages with 24 exhibits" description, and Doc. 18 is the 2021-03-31 stipulation of dismissal. One refinement the earlier sections flagged as unverified — whether dismissal followed a license — the appearance record does not resolve; the stipulation was filed by Rabicoff alone with a proposed order, and no public term sheet, license, or Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii) signed stipulation text is available in the sources I could reach.

I'll research the docket and defense-side appearances for this case.

Counsel of Record for Defendant T-Mobile USA, Inc.

Bottom line, stated plainly: I could not identify any attorney who appeared for T-Mobile in this docket, and I am not going to name one by inference. Unlike the plaintiff's side — where Isaac Rabicoff (Rabicoff Law LLC, Alexandria, Va.) is documented on the face of every filing, including the amended complaint (Doc. 8) and the stipulation of dismissal (Doc. 18) — I found no docket-derived evidence of a defense appearance in No. 6:20-cv-00988. That is a negative finding, not a confirmed absence, and the distinction matters for how you use this section.

What the record actually shows

Two important qualifications on that negative finding:

1. The document index I could retrieve appears incomplete. Patexia's page returned only a handful of rows out of an 18+-entry docket, so the absence of a "Notice of Attorney Appearance" or "Defendant's Unopposed Application for Extension of Time to Answer" in what I saw is not proof that none was filed. Between the amended complaint (Doc. 8, 2020-11-02) and the stipulation (Doc. 18, 2021-03-31) there are nine unaccounted docket entries (Docs. 9–17) — precisely where extension applications, appearances, and pro hac vice orders would sit in a W.D. Tex. case.
2. A true "stipulation" of dismissal implies defense participation. Doc. 18 is described as a stipulation rather than a unilateral Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) notice (compare Cedar Lane's Xerox dismissal, which was styled "Plaintiff's Notice of Voluntary Dismissal Without Prejudice" and signed only by Rabicoff). If Doc. 18 was in fact jointly signed, T-Mobile had counsel engaged and signing by March 2021 even if no formal appearance is reflected in the index — and the case likely resolved by license rather than by walk-away. I could not open Doc. 18 itself to confirm the signature blocks; that is the single highest-value document to pull.

Why I am not filling the gap with a name

There are several well-known firms that handled T-Mobile's W.D. Tex. patent defense work in 2020–2022, and it would be easy to guess one. I am declining to do so because guessing an attorney into a docket creates a fabricated record. For calibration on how counsel did appear in the adjacent Cedar Lane cases (useful only as a pattern, not as evidence about T-Mobile): defendants typically paired a Waco/Austin-resident local counsel with national patent counsel — e.g., Deron R. Dacus (Waco) taking pro hac vice motions for Qualcomm's national team in Cedar Lane v. Qualcomm, No. 6:22-cv-00046; Richard S. Zembek and Eric Conley Green appearing for NXP in Cedar Lane v. NXP USA, No. 6:22-cv-00309; Steven Mark Geiszler for Huawei in Cedar Lane v. Huawei Techs. USA, No. 2:20-cv-00234 (E.D. Tex.). W.D. Tex. Local Rule AT-1 required a local member of the bar in any event, so whoever appeared for T-Mobile almost certainly had local counsel of record in Waco or Austin even if the substantive defense was run from Bellevue or from a national IP firm.

How to close this out (concrete steps)

• PACER, Docket Report for 6:20-cv-00988-ADA, entries 9–18: look for (a) "NOTICE of Attorney Appearance," (b) "Defendant's Unopposed Application for Extension of Time to Answer" (the W.D. Tex. CM/ECF event name in that era), (c) "MOTION to Appear Pro Hac Vice," and (d) orders granting pro hac vice status, which name the attorney and firm in the caption of the order.
• Doc. 18 signature blocks, and any certificate of service — a stipulated dismissal will identify T-Mobile's signing counsel, firm, and address.
• T-Mobile's Rule 7 disclosure statement / corporate disclosure, if filed, which usually carries the same counsel block.
• The related Cedar Lane docket, No. 6:20-cv-00947 (DISH) — filed the same week before Judge Albright — as a probable indicator of which defense team Cedar Lane's '489/'177 wave drew, though again that is inference and cannot be attributed to T-Mobile without confirmation.

Symbol key for reliability: the plaintiff's counsel identification (Rabicoff) is verified from docket text; the absence of T-Mobile counsel is unverified and should be treated as "not found in accessible sources" rather than "none appointed." I recommend this section be finalized only after a PACER pull of the full docket sheet and Doc. 18 — I can draft the language for that update if you want it staged for when the PACER records arrive.