Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. v. Zhuhai RaySharp Technology Co., Ltd.

I'll research this case and its context before drafting the overview.

Case Overview & Background

The parties. Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. is a non-practicing entity, not an operating company: it was incorporated in Canada in 2019, is associated with founder Greg Benoit (a lawyer with a long NPE-litigation background), and holds a large portfolio of acquired patents (roughly 190 of ~193 U.S. patents, per a Shenzhen IP Protection Center risk bulletin relying on Lex Machina data). It does not make or sell anything; it licenses and litigates, and by 2021–2022 it was among the highest-volume patent plaintiffs in the country (that bulletin puts it at 325 federal suits and the #1 filer for 2021), almost always through Isaac Rabicoff of Rabicoff Law LLC. Rabicoff's practice has itself been scrutinized: in Cedar Lane Techs. v. Blackmagic Design, No. 3:20-cv-01302-VC (N.D. Cal. Nov. 19, 2020), Judge Vince Chhabria sanctioned Cedar Lane and Rabicoff for frivolous positions taken in bad faith, fined Rabicoff $1,000, and referred him to the district's Standing Committee on Professional Conduct (In re Rabicoff, No. 20-mc-80206-JD), which later resolved the matter informally with a pro hac vice fee payback agreement. The defendant, Zhuhai RaySharp Technology Co., Ltd., is a Chinese OEM/ODM manufacturer headquartered at No. 100 Keji 6th Road, Zhuhai, Guangdong, that builds video-surveillance and imaging hardware — IP cameras, DVR/NVR units, and camera modules and boards that it supplies to third-party brands (its FCC filings, e.g., FCC ID 2AJ3GRS-CH272SC, cover wireless cameras and module-level equipment, including devices re-branded by customers such as KGUARD). It is a component/supply-chain player rather than a U.S. consumer brand, a profile typical of Cedar Lane's foreign-OEM targets. (NPE Showcase – Cedar Lane; Shenzhen IP Protection Center bulletin; Blackmagic sanctions order)

The patent and the accused technology. The asserted patent in the case metadata is U.S. Patent No. 8,537,242, "Host interface for imaging arrays" — issued September 17, 2013 from Application No. 11/259,791 (filed October 27, 2005), claiming earliest priority to January 2000, inventor Mark Suska, and now owned by Cedar Lane. In one line: it claims a hardware interface, preferably integrated on the same die as the image sensor, that catches imaging-array data in a memory (a FIFO buffer or addressable memory) clocked by the sensor's own clock generator and, when the buffer fills, asserts an interrupt or bus-request signal to the host processor system and then streams the data out at the host's rate — i.e., a sensor-to-applications-processor handshake architecture. The technology is therefore aimed at the image-capture pipeline rather than at any end-user feature, and Cedar Lane's claim charts in these cases typically target products that incorporate image sensors and host-side interface circuitry; here that means RaySharp's cameras, DVR/NVR products and camera modules. Two caveats: (i) litigation databases list this docket as asserting both the '242 and its parent, U.S. Patent No. 6,972,790 (also "Host interface for imaging arrays," issued Dec. 6, 2005), which matches Cedar Lane's boilerplate two-patent complaints of that period, even though the case metadata here lists only the '242 — the pleadings should be confirmed on PACER; and (ii) the complaint's specific "Exemplary Defendant Products" appear only in an attached claim-chart exhibit, which I could not retrieve, so the precise model numbers are not verified. (PatSnap case record, 6:22-cv-01030; Stanford NPE Litigation Database; [Unified Patents patent page](https://portal.un

I'll research this case starting with the docket and patent details.

Cedar Lane Technologies, Inc. v. Zhuhai RaySharp Technology Co., Ltd.

6:22-cv-01030 (W.D. Tex.) — Legal Developments & Disposition

Bottom line up front: This case never reached the merits. It was filed 2022-10-04 and terminated 2023-05-30 — 238 days later — by Cedar Lane's own Notice of Voluntary Dismissal, with no answer, no counterclaims, no motions practice, no claim construction, no discovery milestones of record, no trial, and no PTAB proceeding. It is therefore a procedural data point in Cedar Lane's volume-assertion campaign, not a merits precedent on the '242 patent.

Record discrepancy to flag at the outset. The case metadata in this assignment lists only U.S. Patent No. 8,537,242. The litigation databases (PatSnap's PACER-derived case record and Stanford's NPE Litigation Database) record two patents-in-suit: US 6,972,790 and US 8,537,242, both titled "Host interface for imaging arrays." Cedar Lane's standard complaint template for this campaign asserted both together. I treat both as asserted here but note the '242 is the patent of interest for this assignment.

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1. Chronological Developments

1.1 Filing and initial pleadings

Accused technology / theory. The complaint pled direct and indirect (inducing) infringement of the '242 by Zhuhai RaySharp's imaging/surveillance hardware — the asserted patents claim a host interface for an imaging array comprising a FIFO or addressable memory buffering sensor data clocked by the sensor and read out at a rate set by the host processor, with interrupt or bus-request signaling. Cedar Lane's template complaint used element-by-element infringement charts as exhibits. (Representative parallel complaint text, Cedar Lane v. Alps Alpine, W.D. Wash. 2:23-cv-00001: CourtListener PDF.)

Service is the critical gap. Zhuhai RaySharp is a Chinese manufacturer (No. 100 Keji 6th Road, National Hi-Tech Zone, Zhuhai). Service would have required Hague Convention Central Authority process — months long, with translation and cost. The docket as reported contains no proof of service and no answer deadline reset. That is the most likely mechanical explanation for the dismissal.

1.2 Pre-trial motions of substance — none

There were no motions to dismiss, no motion to transfer venue (notably, no § 1404(a) fight, which a Chinese manufacturer with minimal U.S. contacts might have mounted), no motion to stay pending IPR, and no motion for summary judgment. A pre-answer Rule 41 dismissal moots all of them, and the docket reflects none.

One contextual note with strategic significance: in several parallel W.D. Tex. Cedar Lane cases, Judge Albright's chambers issued orders to show cause where Cedar Lane had not effected service or prosecuted — e.g., Cedar Lane v. Pryntec, 6:22-cv-00955, Order to Show Cause entered 2023-06-08, followed the very next day, 2023-06-09, by Cedar Lane's Notice of Voluntary Dismissal (Patexia docket). I have not verified whether a comparable show-cause order preceded the RaySharp dismissal; the available docket extract does not show one, and I do not assert it.

1.3 Claim construction (Markman) — not reached

No claim construction order, no Markman hearing, no joint claim construction statement, no scheduling order with a Markman date appears in the record. The case did not survive long enough to enter Judge Albright's standing patent scheduling order's claim-construction track.

Consequence: the '242's claim terms — including the "memory" / FIFO limitations and the "signal generator … responsive to the quantity of data in the memory" limitation, which are the natural non-infringement pressure points against standard CMOS sensor read-out architectures — remain unconstrued by any court in this litigation. The only public claim-scope guidance on this family comes from other cases in the campaign (and, as discussed, essentially none of those reached construction either).

1.4 Discovery milestones — none of record

No Rule 26(f) conference, no initial disclosures, no written discovery, no depositions, no third-party subpoenas, no ESI order. Because no defendant appearance is recorded, discovery never opened.

1.5 Trial, verdict, post-trial motions — none

No trial setting, no verdict, no JMOL motion, no new-trial motion, no attorney's-fee motion under 35 U.S.C. § 285, no bill of costs. There was no prevailing party for fee-shifting purposes; a plaintiff's voluntary dismissal ordinarily leaves each side to bear its own costs absent a court order or contractual/undertaking term.

1.6 Final disposition

Prejudice status is not disclosed in the public record. PatSnap reviewed the docket and states the record "is silent on prejudice status and on whether any terms were agreed between the parties prior to the filing." Analytically:

• The Notice was filed with a proposed order, which is Cedar Lane's signature for a Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) dismissal — and in every parallel case I could verify, Rabicoff Law's notice recited dismissal without prejudice. See, e.g., Cedar Lane v. Konica Minolta, 6:22-cv-01074 (W.D. Tex.), "Plaintiff's Notice of Voluntary Dismissal Without Prejudice … Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1)(A)(i) … Defendant has not yet answered the Complaint or moved for summary judgment," dated 2022-11-14 (document).
• I flag this as inference from campaign-wide practice, not a verified reading of the RaySharp docket. Cedar Lane's right to re-assert against Zhuhai RaySharp therefore most likely survives — subject to any statute-of-limitations consequence of the patents' expiry (below).

1.7 Parallel PTAB (IPR/PGR) proceedings — none identified

• No IPR or PGR petition against the '242 or the '790 was identified as filed by or in response to Zhuhai RaySharp. PatSnap's patent records for both patents in connection with this case list "Validity challenges: None recorded."
• This is consistent with the case posture: a defendant that never appeared would not have funded an IPR, and the case died ~8 months post-filing, well inside the § 315(b) one-year bar window.
• Caveat: my searches did not surface PTAB P-TACTS data directly. Cedar Lane's '790/'242 family was asserted ~50+ times (PatSnap lists 52 cases for the '790), so third-party IPR activity against this family is plausible and should be verified against the PTAB Patent Trial and Appeal Board Endpoint / P-TACTS before publication. I do not assert that none exists; I assert only that none exists that is tied to this case or that affected this case's trajectory.

Effect on the litigation: zero. No stay motion was filed, no institution decision issued, and no PTAB outcome shaped the docket.

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2. Present Posture (as of 2026-11-09)

Closed and inactive. Terminated 2023-05-30 by voluntary dismissal; no reopening, no appellate mandate, no surviving judgment. The docket is final.

Two facts now make the case permanently non-repeatable on the merits:

1. Patent expiry. PatSnap reports an estimated expiry of 2023-08-01 for the family (earliest priority 2000-01-21; ~20-year term plus PTA/terminal-disclaimer adjustment). The '242 issued 2013-09-17 from an application filed 2005-10-27 as a continuation. If expiry was indeed mid-2023, the patents lapsed within weeks of the dismissal — foreclosing any meaningful re-assertion against Zhuhai RaySharp (past damages only, bounded by the six-year § 286 lookback and the 2023 sunset) and ending the campaign's enforcement runway.
2. OFAC designation (post-dismissal context, unverified). Sanctions-tracking aggregators record Zhuhai RaySharp Technology Co., Ltd. as added to the U.S. Treasury OFAC SDN list on 2024-10-30 under the Russia program (E.O. 14024) — lursoft sanctions record. This is aggregator-sourced, not confirmed against Treasury's own SDN file, and it postdates the litigation by ~17 months, so it cannot have caused the dismissal. But it is relevant to any future licensing or enforcement calculus: an SDN-listed counterparty raises obvious transaction and payment issues for a U.S. plaintiff.

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3. What This Case Does and Does Not Establish

Does not establish anything about the '242 on the merits. There is no infringement finding, no invalidity finding, no claim construction, and no damages award. Anyone citing Cedar Lane v. Zhuhai RaySharp for claim scope is citing nothing. The patents' validity and infringement scope remain, in PatSnap's phrase, "untested on the merits."

What it does show, as campaign evidence:

• Filing discipline without service discipline. Cedar Lane filed this suit in the same 2022-09/10 window as dozens of others against camera, surveillance, and rental-car defendants (PatSnap logs 52 cases on the '790 alone, naming ZKTeco, Leica Camera, Speco, Lorex, EverFocus, Amlogic Shanghai, Ren

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

Let me dig into the actual docket to confirm appearances.

Counsel of Record for Plaintiff Cedar Lane Technologies Inc.

Bottom line

The public record in No. 6:22-cv-01030 (W.D. Tex., Judge Alan D. Albright) shows one attorney of record for Cedar Lane: Isaac Phillip Rabicoff of Rabicoff Law LLC. No local counsel, no co-counsel, and no in-house counsel appear on the docket. No defendant counsel ever appeared, and Cedar Lane voluntarily dismissed the case on May 30, 2023.

The attorney

Relevant experience and notable matters

• Cedar Lane's principal outside counsel. Rabicoff is the near-exclusive filer for Cedar Lane Technologies, a Canadian NPE incorporated in 2019 that has asserted hundreds of acquired Intellectual-Venture-origin patents. Cedar Lane's '790/'242 "host interface for imaging arrays" family (the patents asserted here) was asserted against dozens of defendants — Leica Camera, Ricoh, STMicroelectronics, Renesas, MediaTek, Lorex, Johnson Controls, Sensormatic, EverFocus, and many others — with Rabicoff on the pleadings.
• High-volume filer. Law.com reported (Nov. 2020, citing Lex Machina) that Rabicoff's name appeared on roughly 600 infringement suits over a two-year period, as counsel for frequent filers Cedar Lane, WSOU Investments, and Symbology Innovations, with nearly half filed in Delaware or Texas.
• Adverse judicial findings. In 2020, Judge Vince Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) sanctioned Cedar Lane and Rabicoff over filings the court described as "objectively frivolous" and made in bad faith, and referred him to the district's Standing Committee on Professional Conduct; Law.com's coverage of the same episode focused on unpaid pro hac vice fees and the court's characterization of him as a "serial filer." These characterizations come from secondary reporting (Mondaq "NPE Showcase – Cedar Lane Technologies," Oct. 6, 2022; Law.com, Nov. 20, 2020) — I did not retrieve the underlying Chhabria order, so treat the specific wording as reported rather than verified.
• Co-counsel pattern. Where local counsel is required or useful, Rabicoff pairs with a local firm rather than appearing alone — e.g., Philip P. Mann (Mann Law Group PLLC, Bainbridge Island, WA) signed the complaint as local counsel with Rabicoff listed "pro hac forthcoming" in Cedar Lane v. Alps Alpine N. Am., W.D. Wash. No. 2:23-cv-00001; Dustin James Edwards (Winston Taylor LLP) appeared alongside him in a 2025 E.D. Tex. Cedar Lane case. No such co-counsel appears in 6:22-cv-01030.

Who is not on the docket

• No local counsel. Unlike several of Cedar Lane's other filings, no Texas-licensed local counsel appears in this case in any source I could locate. (Note the contrast: in the parallel W.D. Tex. matters from the same September/October 2022 filing wave, Rabicoff likewise filed alone.)
• No in-house counsel. Cedar Lane is a Canadian holding company (560 Baker St., Suite 1, Nelson, BC) with no in-house legal department appearing of record.
• No defendant counsel. Zhuhai RaySharp — a Zhuhai, Guangdong surveillance-camera/DVR manufacturer — never appeared. The case was dismissed on Cedar Lane's notice roughly eight months after filing, before any appearance, motion practice, or scheduling order.
• Nothing is sealed in the available record; the gap is not sealing but the brevity of the docket itself.

Sourcing caveats

I could not open the PACER docket sheet or a CourtListener/RECAP page for 6:22-cv-01030 directly. The representation details above are drawn from aggregator records that quote the docket verbatim — PatSnap Litigation Data's case page (which reproduces the May 30, 2023 dismissal entry text) and the Stanford NPE Litigation Database — cross-checked against CourtListener party pages and PACER Monitor party listings for other Cedar Lane matters that show Rabicoff's firm address and contact details. Two discrepancies worth flagging for the file:

1. PatSnap records two patents asserted here, US 6,972,790 and US 8,537,242; the case metadata supplied for this engagement lists only the '242. The two patents are the same family ("Host interface for imaging arrays"), and Cedar Lane routinely pleaded them together (compare the Alps Alpine complaint, which asserts both). The metadata is authoritative per my operating instructions, but the complaint in this case likely pleaded the '790 as well.
2. PatSnap states the dismissal's with/without-prejudice status is not reflected in the public record it holds. Because Cedar Lane dismissed by notice under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) before any defendant appearance, the dismissal was almost certainly without prejudice as a matter of law — but I have not seen a court-entered order confirming it, and you should pull the docket if that status matters.

I'll research the counsel of record for Zhuhai RaySharp Technology Co., Ltd. in this W.D. Tex. case.

The initial results suggest no defendant counsel may have appeared. Let me verify against the actual docket and RECAP records.

Let me try to pull the actual docket record directly.

Bottom line

No attorney has been identified as counsel of record for Zhuhai RaySharp Technology Co., Ltd. in Case No. 6:22-cv-01030 (W.D. Tex.). The available public-record evidence indicates that no defense counsel ever entered an appearance in this case before it was voluntarily dismissed.

This is not an oversight in my search — it appears to be the actual state of the docket. PatSnap's litigation record, which is built off the PACER docket for 6:22-cv-01030, lists the defendant's counsel field as "Not recorded," and its case narrative states: "No defendant counsel appears on the public record, which may suggest the case resolved before formal appearance or engagement." (PatSnap, Cedar Lane Technologies v. Zhuhai RaySharp)

What the docket establishes

Note one discrepancy with the case metadata in my brief: the docket reflects two asserted patents (the '790 and the '242), not the '242 alone.

Why the absence of counsel is plausible here

Three contextual facts line up with a no-appearance dismissal:

1. Foreign defendant. RaySharp is a Zhuhai, Guangdong (China) manufacturer of DVR/NVR and CCTV equipment. Service on Chinese entities under the Hague Service Convention routinely takes 6–12 months and is often returned unexecuted, which fits a 238-day pendency with a plaintiff-initiated exit.
2. This is Cedar Lane's standard playbook. Cedar Lane is a high-volume Canadian NPE; in the parallel W.D. Tex. case against Konica Minolta (6:22-cv-01074), Rabicoff filed a Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) dismissal "without prejudice" barely five weeks after filing, reciting that "Defendant has not yet answered the Complaint or moved for summary judgment" — i.e., dismissal before any defense appearance. (dismissal PDF) The RaySharp case follows the same pattern, just slower.
3. Contemporaneous reporting confirms the same posture in sister cases. Law.com Radar's write-up of the parallel Cedar Lane v. Hertz suit (6:22-cv-01216) states flatly: "Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendant."

Important caveats — what I could not confirm

• I was not able to pull the raw PACER docket sheet for 6:22-cv-01030 directly in this session (paywalled/reCAPTCHA-gated). My conclusion rests on PatSnap's docket-derived counsel table and case analysis, corroborated by the procedural pattern in Cedar Lane's sister cases.
• PatSnap's note that prejudice status is "not publicly disclosed" is likely an aggregator limitation rather than a sealed filing; Cedar Lane's Rule 41(a)(1) notices in W.D. Tex. are typically styled "without prejudice." Recommend verifying Dkt. entries 1–10 and the order closing the case to confirm (a) whether a summons return of service was ever filed, and (b) the prejudice designation.
• Nothing here should be read as identifying RaySharp's outside counsel. No firm has been confirmed. I am not supplying names from the related Longse/NEXCOM/Zenitel matters, because those are different defendants with different counsel and using them here would be fabrication.
• One additional factual note, flagged as context only: Zhuhai RaySharp (珠海安联锐视科技股份有限公司, USCC 91440400665003767C) was added to the OFAC SDN list on Oct. 30, 2024, under EO 14024 (Russia program), carrying secondary-sanctions risk. That designation post-dates this litigation by ~17 months, so it cannot have driven the 2023 dismissal — but it is material to any current assessment of enforcing or settling against this entity.

Recommended next step

To close the gap definitively, pull the PACER docket for 6:22-cv-01030 and check: (i) the Summons Returned Executed/ Unexecuted entry, if any; (ii) any Notice of Attorney Appearance filed between Oct. 2022 and May 2023; and (iii) the order terminating the case. If the docket is truly bare of defense filings, the correct characterization for your purposes is: defendant was never represented by counsel of record in this action.