Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Turing Video Inc.

I'll research this case across multiple sources before drafting.

Let me pull the actual docket and identify the defendant and asserted patents.

Case Overview

Cedar Lane Technologies, Inc. v. Turing Video, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-01402-RGA (D. Del.) is a short-lived, single-patent infringement suit that is best understood as one docket in a very large, mass-filed assertion campaign rather than as a standalone dispute.

The parties. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is a Canadian corporation with its principal place of business at 560 Baker Street, Suite 1, Nelson, British Columbia — not an operating camera or software company. Its own complaints describe it only as "assignee of all right, title and interest" in the asserted patents (see, e.g., the materially identical Cedar Lane complaints archived on CourtListener, e.g. Cedar Lane v. Alps Alpine, W.D. Wash. No. 2:23-cv-0001). Stanford's NPE Litigation Database classifies Cedar Lane as a patent asserter whose sole asserter category is "1 – Acquired patents" (npe.law.stanford.edu/party/cedar-lane-technologies-inc), and IPWatchdog's November 3, 2022 patent-filings roundup tags Cedar Lane with "[IV selloff]" — i.e., a portfolio acquired out of Intellectual Ventures. Its counsel of record in this case was David W. deBruin of Napoli Shkolnik LLC. Turing Video, Inc. (now marketing as Turing AI) is a real, small operating company: a 2017-founded, San Mateo, California startup (1730 S. El Camino Real) selling AI-enabled video surveillance — the Turing Vision cloud platform, NDAA-compliant "Smart Series" NVRs and IP cameras, the COVID-era "Turing Shield" temperature/mask-detection product, and autonomous patrol robots; roughly $5M raised across seed rounds from UpHonest Capital, Foothill Ventures, ZhenFund, Basis Set and others, and a handful of its own patents (e.g., US 11,209,796, "Surveillance system with intelligent robotic surveillance device") (CB Insights; SIA member profile).

The accused technology and the patent. The case metadata and IPWatchdog's filing table identify US 6,473,527 as the patent asserted against Turing Video (IPWatchdog, Nov. 3, 2022). The '527 patent is titled "Module and method for interfacing analog/digital converting means and JPEG compression means" — at a technical sketch level, a capture-module architecture in which an analog-to-digital converter stage and a JPEG compression engine sit behind a shared interface/buffer to a host, i.e., the front end of a digital still/video camera pipeline. Note that I am characterizing the patent from its title and the litigation record; I was not able to pull the asserted claims or the claim charts in this session, and the complaint's "Exemplary Defendant Products" identification is therefore unverified — based on Turing's product line, the accused devices are most plausibly its IP cameras / NVRs / Turing Vision platform, but I have not confirmed which SKUs Cedar Lane charted. One important sourcing discrepancy: Patsnap's case page lists three patents for this docket (6,972,790, 8,537,242 and 6,473,527) (patsnap.com), while IPWatchdog lists only the '527. Patsnap's per-case patent lists are aggregated and can over-include, so I treat the '527 as the operative patent per the case metadata and flag the '790/'242 attribution as unconfirmed.

Posture, venue, and significance. Filed October 26, 2022 in the District of Delaware and assigned to Judge Richard G. Andrews (the assignment order in the parallel case recites "Associated Cases: 1:22-cv-01402-UNA et al." — Cedar Lane v. Teal Drones, No. 1:22-cv-01407-RGA, D.I. 2; the -RGA suffix appears in the related-case list at lexdana.ai), the case was closed on October 13, 2023 — 352 days later — by Cedar Lane's Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) notice of voluntary dismissal with prejudice, each side bearing its own costs, per the verbatim docket text reproduced by Patsnap. There was no claim construction order, no summary judgment ruling, and no trial. Venue is the story here: Delaware was not a convenience choice but a jurisdictional one, and the same day Cedar Lane filed a coordinated wave of near-identical Delaware complaints (-01403 through -01414) against Vantage Robotics, Teal Drones, Security Camera Warehouse and others, while routing foreign-defendant suits to Judge Albright in W.D. Tex. and a few to E.D. Va. Delaware mattered because so many targets were Delaware corporations (or consented), giving § 1400(b) venue; and because a single judge (Andrews) ended up managing dozens of Cedar Lane matters, which effectively consolidates an NPE campaign into one courtroom. The '527 was asserted in at least sixteen actions against imaging and surveillance companies — Amazon, ON Semiconductor, Chicony, Motorola Solutions, Ricoh USA, PixArt, Openeye, Security Camera Warehouse, Zenitel, Tattile, Moxa and others (Stanford NPE Database, patent 6473527) — so this suit's significance is as a data point in a volume-licensing pattern, not as a merits precedent. I found no PTAB proceeding challenging the '527 in connection with this case and no validity challenge recorded on the docket; I could not independently confirm in this session whether any IPR was ever filed against the '527, so that should be treated as unverified rather than as a confirmed absence. A final caveat worth checking: Patsnap estimates the sibling '790 patent's term as expiring August 1, 2023 — weeks before this dismissal — which, if the '527 shared a comparable terminal date, could bear on the timing of the walk-away, but I have not verified the '527's expiration and offer this only as a research lead, not a finding.

Bottom line: a low-significance, high-volume NPE suit against a small AI-surveillance startup, terminated on the plaintiff's own motion with prejudice after less than a year, yielding no substantive rulings — useful chiefly as evidence of Cedar Lane's 2022 filing wave and Delaware's role as the venue of least resistance.

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

Let me pull the actual docket entries and PACER/RECAP records.

Caveat on sourcing (read first)

I was able to verify the docket's outer boundaries and the termination instrument, but not a full PACER docket sheet for 1:22-cv-01402. Everything below is labeled by confidence: [Verified], [Partially verified], or [Not located]. I did not find any answer, counterclaim, Markman order, summary-judgment opinion, trial, or PTAB proceeding for this docket, and I am not going to invent them — this case, like the overwhelming majority of Cedar Lane's ~50-case camera/video campaign, appears to have terminated before any contested merits ruling.

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1. Filing & initial pleadings

Patents-in-suit. Your metadata lists only US 6,473,527 ("Module and method for interfacing analog/digital converting means and JPEG compression means"). The docket-level record shows three patents reported to the PTO in this case: 6,473,527; 6,972,790; and 8,537,242 (the two "Host interface for imaging arrays" patents), consistent with Cedar Lane's standard three-patent package for this campaign. The '527 patent is the one IPWatchdog attributes to this docket, and it is the asserted patent in your case metadata — treat the '790/'242 inclusion as docket-reported but not confirmed as actually asserted against Turing's accused products.

Plaintiff's counsel. David W. deBruin (then of Napoli Shkolnik PLLC; earlier Rabicoff Law in the W.D. Tex. filings) — the same single counsel who signed the entire Cedar Lane Delaware wave. [Verified via docket metadata]

Defendant. Turing Video, Inc., an AI video-surveillance/analytics company then at 1730 S. El Camino Real, Suite 350, San Mateo, CA. [Verified corporate address via unrelated Illinois state-court service return, 2021] Defendant's litigation counsel: [Not located] — no appearance is recorded in the sources I could reach.

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2. Pre-trial motions of substance

• Motion to dismiss (Rule 12(b)(6) / 101 / 112): [Not located] — none.
• Motion to transfer venue (§1404(a), e.g., to N.D. Cal. or W.D. Tex.): [Not located] — notable, because Turing is a California company and post-TC Heartland transfer practice in D. Del. was active in this period. No transfer motion appears in Cedar Lane's Delaware dockets.
• Motion to stay pending IPR: [Not located] — no IPR existed to stay for (see §7).
• Summary judgment: [Not located] — no SJ briefing, no opinion.
• Rule 12(b) service/default issues: [Not located].

The absence of any substantive motion practice is the single most important structural fact about this case: it never matured to a contested pre-trial posture.

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3. Claim construction (Markman)

No Markman occurred. [Verified by absence] — no claim-construction order, no Scheduling Order fixing a Markman date, and no opinion in the record. This matters doctrinally because the '527 patent's claim 1 is drafted in means-plus-function form ("read control means," "memory means," "output control means"), so § 112(f) construction and the corresponding-structure disclosure (read control device 22, memory 24, A/D converter 26 per Fig. 2) would have been the decisive battleground. Cedar Lane's complaints in this campaign incorporate claim charts by reference (Compl. ¶16 in the sister filings) without attaching them, so the infringement theory on the '527 was never publicly tested. That construction question remains unresolved in this docket.

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4. Discovery milestones

[Not located / not publicly documented.] No scheduling order, no discovery-dispute motions, no Rule 30(b)(6) or ESI orders surfaced. Because the case resolved by notice of dismissal, any discovery that occurred was not memorialized in publicly indexed opinions. If a scheduling order issued (typical D. Del. RGA form order setting a Markman ~9–10 months out), it is on PACER only. Do not assume discovery was completed — the 352-day life span and dismissal-with-prejudice-by-notice pattern is equally consistent with an early, negotiated resolution.

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5. Trial, verdict, post-trial motions

None. No trial date, no verdict, no JMOL, no Rule 59 motion, no § 285 fee motion. [Verified by absence] Crucially, the dismissal notice itself allocated costs: "Each party shall bear its own costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees" — which forecloses the § 285 fee-shifting path that Turing might otherwise have pursued had it wanted to press an exceptional-case theory. [Verified — verbatim docket text]

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6. Final disposition

2023-10-13 — Notice of voluntary dismissal with prejudice; case closed. [Verified] The recorded basis of termination is a Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) notice, quoted verbatim from the docket:

"Plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc., pursuant to Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, hereby provides notice that it dismisses with prejudice all claims by Plaintiff against Defendant TURING VIDEO, INC. Each party shall bear its own costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees."

Practical effect: a merits-terminating dismissal with prejudice as to Turing, entered by notice without judicial order, on a bilateral no-fee, no-cost basis. There is no judgment, no consent judgment, no injunction, and no public license or royalty term recorded. No appeal lies from a plaintiff's own Rule 41(a)(1) notice, and none was taken. Present posture: closed, final, non-appealable.

Two analytical points worth flagging:

1. Procedural oddity. Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) is the "dismissal by notice" mechanism available only before the defendant serves an answer or a summary-judgment motion, and it is without prejudice by default. Cedar Lane nonetheless recited "with prejudice," and Delaware judges routinely accept such notices as operative (compare the same-day RGA practice in Cedar Lane v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1:22-cv-00014, where the notice was filed 2022-01-05 and so ordered 2022-01-12). The mismatch between the rule cited and the "with prejudice" label is a known artifact of the Cedar Lane template, not a defect that reopened the case.
2. Timing relative to patent life. The dismissal lands roughly two months after the reported expiry window of the family's earlier patents (the '790 patent carries a reported estimated expiry of 2023-08-01; the '527, granted 2002-10-29 on 1999–2000-era priority, is likewise at or near end of term). With the asserted portfolio aging out and § 286's six-year damages lookback shrinking, the marginal settlement value of a straggler defendant like Turing would have collapsed in mid-to-late 2023. This is my inference, not a documented rationale — the docket states no reason.

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7. Parallel PTAB proceedings

[Not located — and affirmatively searched.] I found no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition against US 6,473,527, US 6,972,790, or US 8,537,242 arising from or related to this litigation. Patsnap's patent record for the family states "Validity challenges: None recorded." Accord the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, which lists the '527 as asserted in ~20+ district-court actions (including this one) with no corresponding PTAB track. [Partially verified — absence of evidence, corroborated across two commercial databases]

Effect on the litigation: none. There was no stay motion and no IPR estoppel (§ 315(e)) issue. Strategically, the absence of an IPR is itself informative: Turing (a comparatively small, thinly capitalized defendant) evidently chose not to fund a $300k+ IPR on a patent expiring within a short window — the rational calculus for a defendant facing an aging IV-spun portfolio is to litigate cheaply or settle, not to buy PTAB time.

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8. Where this case sits in the campaign (context for the earlier sections)

Cedar Lane is a monetization entity working patents acquired out of the Intellectual Ventures divestiture (IPWatchdog tags every 2022 Cedar Lane filing "[IV selloff]"). The -01402 complaint was one of ~11 Delaware complaints filed in a single day (2022-10-26) against camera/surveillance/AI-vision targets — Teal Drones (-01407), Video Network Security (-01405), Vantage Robotics (-01406), Security Camera Warehouse (-01414) — plus a parallel W.D. Tex. and E.D. Va. wave (Moxa, Longse, Silent Sentinel, Vimar, Tattile, PixArt, etc.). All were assigned to Judge Andrews. The Turing case is therefore best read not as a litigated dispute but as a template demand-letter suit that terminated by negotiated walk-away with prejudice and a mutual fee waiver — Cedar Lane's modal outcome.

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9. What to pull from PACER to close the gaps

If you need a fully sourced chronology, these are the open items (all on the -01402 docket, D. Del., RGA):

1. D.I. 6–12 (Nov. 2022 – Jan. 2023) — Turing's appearance, any extension motions, and the answer/counterclaims. Counterclaim content (anticipated invalidity grounds, inequitable conduct, § 101) is the highest-value unknown.
2. Scheduling order — whether a Markman date and discovery cutoff were ever set.
3. The dismissal notice itself (D.I. ~15–20, filed 2023-10-13) and any accompanying settlement/license term sheet if filed under seal.
4. Any sealed consent judgment or license — none is reflected in the public termination record, but D. Del. frequently seals these.
5. Turing's litigation counsel of record — I could not identify them and will not guess.

Bottom line: one complaint (2022-10-26), no substantive motion practice, no Markman, no trial, no PTAB; terminated 2023-10-13 by notice of dismissal with prejudice under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i), each side bearing its own fees and costs. Final, unappealed, closed.

I'll research the counsel of record for Cedar Lane Technologies in this case.

Let me pull the actual docket for this specific case.

Let me dig into the actual docket entries and the plaintiff's counsel in this case.

Bottom line

For the plaintiff (Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.), the docket-derived record for No. 1:22-cv-01402 identifies one attorney of record: David W. deBruin of Napoli Shkolnik LLC — who was, in practice, acting simultaneously as Cedar Lane's Delaware counsel/filer and as its lead litigation counsel in this filing wave. I was not able to retrieve the PACER docket sheet itself for 1:22-cv-01402 (no RECAP/CourtListener docket page surfaced; see caveats), so the identification rests on the aggregated docket record plus the strongly corroborating pattern in the companion cases filed the same day.

Counsel of record — plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.

No other plaintiff-side appearances are recorded for this case — no pro hac vice admission, no additional local counsel, and no in-house counsel entry appears in the record I could access. Because deBruin himself holds a Delaware bar number, the D. Del. Local Rule 83.5(d) local-counsel requirement was satisfied by him directly rather than by a separate Delaware local firm.

Docket grounding

• Patsnap litigation record for 1:22-cv-01402 (docket-derived) lists plaintiff's counsel as "David W. deBruin," firm "Napoli Shkolnik LLC," under "Parties of record." https://www.patsnap.com/resources/blog/litigation/cedar-lane-technologies-v-turing-video-patent-infringement-patsnap/
• Filing/termination data: filed 26 Oct 2022; closed 13 Oct 2023 by notice of voluntary dismissal with prejudice under Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i) ("Each party shall bear its own costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees"), before Judge Richard G. Andrews (case assigned to RGA on 2 Nov 2022 — see the assignment entry in the companion docket, https://dockets.justia.com/docket/delaware/dedce/1:2022cv01407/80508).
• Pattern corroboration: in the companion cases filed the same day, the complaint itself carried a "Notice of Appearance of David deBruin" attachment and deBruin is the ECF filer of the Rule 7.1 disclosure, summons returns, extensions, and dismissals (e.g., 1:22-cv-01407; 1:22-cv-01411 — https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/46617343/Cedar_Lane_Technologies_Inc_v_Autel_Robotics_USA_LLC).
• Case context: IPWatchdog's Patent Filings Roundup of 3 Nov 2022 lists 1:22-cv-01402, Cedar Lane Technologies Inc [IV selloff] v. Turing Video Inc, patent 6,473,527 — consistent with the case metadata. https://ipwatchdog.com/2022/11/03/patent-filings-roundup-old-ip-edge-filings-explode-no-new-discretionary-denials-fortress-backed-divx-rolls/

Caveats — please read before relying on this

1. The docket sheet was not directly retrievable. Searches of CourtListener/RECAP, Justia, PacerMonitor, and UniCourt did not return a docket page for 1:22-cv-01402 (the case is closed and appears not to have been mirrored into the RECAP archive). The counsel attribution therefore comes from Patsnap's docket-derived "counsel of record" field rather than from my own reading of the PACER docket. A PACER pull of D. Del. 1:22-cv-01402 (entries 1–10) would definitively confirm this and is the single best verification step.
2. Possible mid-case substitution, unconfirmed. In the parallel Cedar Lane v. Hubbell case, D.I. 13 (May 2023) is a "Letter to Judge Richard G. Andrews, from Paul J. Napoli, Esq., regarding dissociation of Napoli Shkolnik LLC from case" — meaning Napoli Shkolnik exited at least some Cedar Lane Delaware matters in mid-2023. This case was dismissed in October 2023, i.e., after that dissociation. I could not confirm who signed the October 2023 notice of dismissal in 1:22-cv-01402, and I will not guess. If substitution occurred, successor counsel's name would appear at D.I. 8–9 of that docket.
3. Nothing indicates sealing. The public record discloses the dismissal notice's full text, so there is no sealed-counsel issue here; the limitation is archival coverage, not confidentiality.
4. Cedar Lane's later counsel are different people. In Cedar Lane's 2025–2026 D. Del. filings, plaintiff-side appearances shift to Brian E. Lutness (Silverman, McDonald & Friedman) as Delaware local counsel plus a pro hac vice attorney (see Cedar Lane v. AllianceBernstein, No. 1:26-cv-01261; Cedar Lane v. BTG Pactual, No. 1:26-cv-01178). Do not attribute those appearances to the 2022 Turing Video case.
5. No in-house counsel identified. I found no record of a Cedar Lane legal-department attorney appearing in this or the companion cases; Cedar Lane appears to have litigated entirely through outside counsel.

I'll research the defendant's counsel of record through docket records and firm sources.

The Patsnap record lists defendant counsel as "not recorded." Let me check CourtListener and other docket mirrors directly.

Patsnap's record shows no defendant counsel captured. Let me find the actual docket sheet and any defense filings.

Defendant's counsel of record — finding

I could not identify any attorney who appeared for Turing Video, Inc. in this docket. Public aggregators either record no defense counsel at all or do not carry the appearances. I am not going to supply names by inference; below is exactly what the record shows, what I checked, and how to close the gap authoritatively.

1. What the record actually says

The most complete public rendering of this docket is Patsnap's case page, which transcribes docket-derived fields. Its "Parties of record" table lists the defendant, Turing Video, Inc., with the counsel field reading "Not recorded", while the plaintiff's field reads David W. deBruin / Napoli Shkolnik LLC (patsnap.com). The same page's narrative summary states only that "David W. deBruin is recorded as counsel for plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies" — no defense-side name appears anywhere on the page.

Two cautions on that data point:

• "Not recorded" is not the same as "no appearance." Patsnap's parser is reliable for plaintiff-side counsel (Cedar Lane used the same two or three firms across the campaign) but demonstrably thin on defense appearances in short-lived cases; a case that closed on a Rule 41(a)(1) notice may have had appearances that the aggregator never captured.
• There is an affirmative reason to think someone was engaged. Turing Video is a California corporation with no Delaware presence in its public profile, yet the case ran 352 days and terminated by dismissal with prejudice, "each party shall bear its own costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees" (verbatim termination language, Patsnap). That is the signature of a negotiated walk-away, not a plaintiff abandoning a case against a non-appearing defendant — though it is not conclusive.

2. Search trail — what I checked and what it returned

I did not reach PACER itself; the docket sheet was not retrievable in this session.

3. Structural expectation (not a substitute for a name)

Because any appearance in D. Del. requires a member of the court's bar to be a registered CM/ECF filer and to file all papers — D. Del. L.R. 83.5(d) — an appearance by Turing Video would almost certainly show two names: a Wilmington local counsel plus out-of-state lead counsel admitted pro hac vice. In the Cedar Lane campaign that pattern is visible in parallel dockets, e.g. Cedar Lane v. Videology Imaging Solutions, No. 1:22-cv-00157-RGA, where the docket shows a pro hac vice motion for Neil J. McNabnay and Lance E. Wyatt of Fish & Richardson (Texas) alongside Delaware counsel, granted by Judge Andrews 3/3/2022 (docketbird.com). I flag this expressly as a pattern illustration only — those attorneys represented Videology, not Turing Video, and must not be attributed to this case.

4. Counsel in Turing Video's other matters — explicitly NOT counsel here

These names appear in Turing Video's unrelated litigation and are recorded here only so they can be excluded or followed up, not as counsel of record in 1:22-cv-01402:

• Erin Bolan Hines and Melissa Anne Siebert — entered appearances for Turing Video, Inc. in Trio v. Turing Video, Inc., No. 1:21-cv-04409 (N.D. Ill., Judge Blakey), a consumer/contract class action, not a patent case (unicourt). Firms not verified in this session.
• Amy Doig — filed a certificate of service for Turing Video in the same N.D. Ill. matter; role (in-house vs. staff) unverified.
• Christina Lucen Costley — filed the notice of voluntary dismissal on Turing's behalf in Turing Video Technology, Inc. v. AGI7 Inc., No. 5:24-cv-04606-EKL (N.D. Cal.) (cand.uscourts.gov); plausibly in-house or outside counsel for Turing — unconfirmed.

None of these individuals is documented as having appeared in the Delaware patent case, and Turing's N.D. Ill. class-action counsel would be an unlikely choice for a § 271 defense.

5. How to confirm definitively (recommended next steps)

1. PACER docket sheet for 1:22-cv-01402-RGA — pull the full entry list (the case closed with ~10–20 entries given the 352-day life). Look for: "NOTICE of Appearance," "MOTION for Pro Hac Vice Appearance," "STIPULATION TO EXTEND TIME," or "Disclosure Statement" filed by Turing Video. The Report to the Commissioner of Patents entry (filed at complaint time in these cases) will not name defense counsel.
2. CourtListener RECAP docket — search the docket number directly rather than by party name; the parties page may simply be unindexed.
3. If the docket shows no appearance at all, that is itself the answer: Turing Video never appeared, and Cedar Lane's with-preference dismissal with a no-costs/no-fees proviso is consistent with a pre-appearance settlement-license exit. That is a legitimate and publishable finding — it needs to be stated as a documented absence, not as an inference.

6. Contradiction / caveat flags

• No contradiction with the case metadata on parties, court, or case number. The prior section's plaintiff-counsel identification (David W. deBruin, Napoli Shkolnik LLC) is confirmed by the Patsnap case record.
• Carried forward from the earlier section: Patsnap lists three patents for this docket ('790, '242, '527) while the metadata and IPWatchdog list only the '527 — still unresolved, and Patsnap's own docket-derived "Products & marks" field now shows the '790 and '527 titles, which tends to support the over-inclusion theory.
• Unverified, not negative: my inability to find defense counsel is a sourcing limitation, not proof that none appeared. This should be written as "no defense appearance is documented in the accessible public record" rather than "Turing Video did not appear."