Google LLC et al. v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC

Case overview and background

The parties. The petitioner/defendant side is Google LLC and YouTube, LLC — operating companies that distribute video through YouTube and Google's communications products and that implement industry video-coding standards (H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC) in software. The patent owner is Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC, a Texas LLC with a principal place of business in Bronxville, New York, and an affiliate of Realtime Data LLC — a well-known non-practicing entity (courts have described Realtime Data as "a non-practicing entity," In re Morgan Stanley, 417 F. App'x 947, 948 (Fed. Cir. 2011), quoted in Google's acquisition-bar motion in the parallel case). Realtime's model is patent acquisition and assertion: it ran a broad campaign against video-streaming and HEVC-implementing companies (Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Adobe, Samsung, Brightcove, Wowza, Polycom, Sling/DISH/ARRIS, Haivision), and in the C.D. Cal. action Google noted that Realtime "has filed dozens of lawsuits against technology companies, alleging infringement of patents related to data compression." Realtime's counsel is Russ August & Kabat (Philip X. Wang, lead PTAB counsel per its updated power of attorney in IPR2019-01033/-01035/-01036); Google's district-court counsel is Munger, Tolles & Olson, with Naveen Modi leading the PTAB petitions.

The technology and the patent at issue. The patent challenged here is U.S. Patent No. 9,578,298, "Method for Decoding 2D-Compatible Stereoscopic Video Flows" (Ballocca et al.), which issued from a § 371 national-stage entry of PCT/IB2011/52810 and claims priority to Italian application TO2010A0549 (filed June 28, 2010). In one line: the '298 patent claims a decoder that receives a stereoscopic ("3D") video stream of composite frames packed side-by-side or top-bottom, reads metadata (or a frame-packing SEI-type indication) describing the geometry/type of the packing, determines the region of the composite frame occupied by one eye's image, and decodes only that region to produce a 2D-compatible output. Realtime's infringement theory against Google did not involve 3D video at all; it mapped claim 1 onto ordinary HEVC decoding — the H.265 frame-packing-arrangement SEI messages, the "default display window" VUI parameters, and HEVC "tiles" for region-independent decoding — as reflected in its contentions quoted in the record (see also the similar theory rejected as too thin in Realtime Adaptive Streaming v. Netflix, D. Del. No. 17-1692 (Dec. 12, 2018) report and recommendation denying dismissal as to the '298 patent). In the IPR, Google petitioned on May 6, 2019 against claims 1-4, 7-11 and 13, on pre-AIA § 103 grounds built on Suh (US 2010/0225645) in combination with Karppinen (US 2006/0015919), plus Tian, Butler and Naske for dependent claims; institution issued November 13, 2019 (Paper 9), and the Board's final written decision followed on November 10, 2020, with the certificate issuing July 21, 2021 (per the case metadata). I could not verify the substantive outcome of the final written decision from the sources retrieved — notably, the Board in Netflix's separate IPR2018-01227 had issued a January 2020 FWD holding that none of claims 1-19 of the '298 patent was shown unpatentable, so the Google result (different art, different petitioner) should not be assumed; it should be confirmed on the PTAB docket/Patent Center before being stated as a holding.

Procedural posture and why it matters. The IPR is the administrative side of Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Google LLC and YouTube, LLC, No. 2:18-cv-03629-GW-JC (C.D. Cal., Western Division, Los Angeles), before Judge George H. Wu and Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian. That case asserted five patents against Google: the "Fallon" family — the '046 patent ("Bandwidth Sensitive Data Compression and Decompression," selecting a compression routine based on tracked throughput) and its continuations the '535 and '477 patents (selecting among asymmetric compressors) — plus the '298 patent (Ballocca stereoscopic decoding) and RE46,777. On May 2, 2019 the parties jointly stipulated to stay the case pending IPRs, noting that the Board had instituted review of four of the five patents covering 30 of the 32 asserted claims (the '298 IPR being one of the "pending" petitions at that moment) — an unusually complete stay that effectively moved the merits to the PTAB and is itself a notable data point on IPR-driven case management in NPE suits. The venue matters because C.D. Cal. was Realtime's chosen forum after it voluntarily dismissed its Delaware action against Netflix and refiled in California (conduct a court later found exceptional as forum shopping), and because Judge Wu had already ruled on § 101 motions in the related Adobe case (No. 2:18-cv-09344-GW-JC), granting Google's Rule 12(b)(6) motion as to claims 15-30 of the '535 patent while denying it as to the '046 and '477 patents (Order of Oct. 25, 2018), and issuing a consolidated claim construction ruling on July 25, 2019 (Doc. 92) that construed, among others, claim 1 of the '298 patent. The broader significance is twofold: (1) the case is a leading example of HEVC/standards-implementation patent assertion by an NPE against a platform operator, and of the JPML's refusal to centralize the campaign (In re Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC Patent Litig., 326 F. Supp. 3d 1374 (J.P.M.L. 2018), denying MDL No. 2845 over eight Realtime patents); and (2) PTAB outcomes in these Realtime cases became "red flags" in later fee litigation in the District of Colorado Sling TV case, where the court awarded roughly $3.9 million in fees and the Federal Circuit subsequently addressed the red-flag/exceptionality analysis (Realtime Adaptive Streaming L.L.C. v. Sling TV, L.L.C.) — a caution that PTAB results here had consequences well beyond the IPR bar.

Sourcing caveats: party/case identifiers, the C.D. Cal. stay and claim construction record, the '298 petition grounds and institution date, and the November 10, 2020 FWD date are grounded in PTAB filings/exhibits and the docket aggregators (PTAB Center documents at ptacts.uspto.gov petition 1525803; ipverse.greyb.com case page; C.D. Cal. Doc. 92 via docketalarm). The specific disposition of the Google FWD, any Federal Circuit appeal of IPR2019-01036, and the final resolution of the C.D. Cal. action were not confirmed in the materials I could retrieve and should be verified against PACER and the PTAB docket before publication.

I'll research this carefully — note the case metadata is a PTAB IPR, so I'll trace both the IPR and the underlying district court litigation.

Now let me dig into the underlying C.D. Cal. Google litigation and the IPR outcome.

Excellent docket detail. Now let me pin down the IPR final written decision outcome and the July 2021 final ruling in C.D. Cal.

I'll search several angles to find press coverage of this IPR and the underlying district court case.

Press coverage of IPR2019-01036

Bottom line: I could not locate any substantive news or trade-press article about IPR2019-01036 itself. Searches on the case caption ("Google LLC v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming," IPR2019-01036), the parties, the underlying C.D. Cal. action (No. 2:18-cv-03629), and the patent number ("9,578,298" / Ballocca stereoscopic decoding) returned almost exclusively primary documents — PTAB papers, petitions, demonstratives, district-court filings and docket aggregator pages — rather than journalism. No Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Law360, Ars Technica, The Verge, IPWatchdog, Patently-O or EFF item on this IPR or on the '298 patent surfaced in the searches. Law360 does maintain a docket page for the proceeding (Law360), but the page returns no article text and I could not confirm any Law360 story exists; I therefore cannot attribute any reported account of the institution, the final written decision, or the July 21, 2021 certificate to a news outlet. Notably, the Realtime campaign's press footprint attached to the compression patents (the Fallon family and the '610 patent), not to the stereoscopic '298 patent that is the subject of this IPR.

Where the case does surface: law-firm analysis of the parallel fee litigation. The closest thing to published commentary comes from firm-side write-ups of the Federal Circuit's decision in Realtime Adaptive Streaming L.L.C. v. Sling TV, L.L.C., No. 23-1035 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 23, 2024), which reviewed a Colorado district court's § 285 fee award against Realtime built on six "red flags." IP Update (McDermott Will & Emery), republished by The National Law Review, reported that the Federal Circuit vacated the award and remanded, agreeing that the earlier Google and Netflix § 101 rulings against related Realtime claims were legitimate warning signs but faulting the district court's treatment of the other flags — including the PTAB's invalidation of claims in the '535 IPR, which the panel said the court "did not adequately explain." A parallel analysis by Timothy Bianchi of Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner in The National Law Review likewise summarized the history as one in which "claims 1-14 of the '535 patent were found to be unpatentable on obviousness grounds" in the Google-owned IPRs, prompting Realtime to drop those claims. Neither piece discusses IPR2019-01036 or the '298 patent; both treat the Google PTAB results only as background to the exceptional-case analysis.

Corporate disclosure rather than journalism supplies the reported numbers. The only quantified account I found is DISH's own annual-report disclosure (archived DISH annual report), which states that the Colorado district court declared the case exceptional on January 21, 2022 and awarded $3.9 million in fees on September 20, 2022; that the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded on August 23, 2024 and denied rehearing en banc on November 26, 2024; and that on remand the court denied the exceptional-case motion on February 5, 2025, with DISH dismissing its appeal on July 3, 2025. That is a party filing, not press reporting, and it concerns the Sling/DISH action, not Google's IPR. Patently-O's only apparent engagement with this litigation is hosting Realtime's appellant brief as a PDF (Patently-O), which argues the "red flags" — including the Google and Netflix decisions and the Board's '535 rulings — were insufficient to support exceptionality; that is advocacy, not reporting, and I found no Patently-O post discussing IPR2019-01036.

Two discrepancies to flag against the existing case summary. First, the previously generated overview states that "the Board's final written decision followed on November 10, 2020." The November 10, 2020 final written decision I was able to retrieve is captioned in IPR2019-01033 (the '046 patent) and determined that "Petitioner has not shown by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 1 and 23 of U.S. Patent No. 7,386,046 B2 are unpatentable" (Docket Alarm copy of the FWD). The date appears to have been carried over from the sibling proceeding; the substance and date of the '298 final written decision remain unverified. Separately, the record shows that Google's appeal from IPR2019-01033 was affirmed without opinion under Fed. Cir. R. 36 on June 15, 2022 in No. 2021-1545 (Federal Circuit Rule 36 judgment) — a result that generated no press coverage that I could find, consistent with the general absence of reporting on this docket.

Sources

• IPR2019-01036 ('298 Patent)
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• patentability
• IPR2019-01035, No. 15 Power of Attorney - REALTIME ADAPTIVE STREAMING LLCS UPDATED POWER OF ATTORNEY (P.T.A.B. Feb. 3, 2020) - Exhibits:
• * (54) _Apple Inc
• IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLORADO
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• IN THE UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• RUSS, AUGUST & KABAT Marc A
• TED DANE (SBN 143195) ted
• TED DANE (State Bar No

I'll verify counsel from PTAB filings and firm sources. Note an immediate terminology wrinkle: in this IPR the metadata labels Google/YouTube as "Plaintiff(s)" (they are the petitioners, and defendants in the parallel C.D. Cal. action), while Realtime is the patent owner. I'll cover the petitioners/plaintiffs' counsel as the primary answer, and also confirm patent owner's counsel for completeness.

Now let me pull the '036-specific filings and confirm the full Paul Hastings team and Realtime's PTAB counsel.

Threshold point on party labels

The case metadata lists Google LLC and YouTube, LLC as "Plaintiff(s)" and Realtime as "Defendant(s)." That is the inverse of the underlying litigation posture: in Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Google LLC, No. 2:18-cv-03629-GW-JC (C.D. Cal.), Realtime is the plaintiff and Google/YouTube are defendants; before the Board, Google/YouTube are petitioners and Realtime is the patent owner. There is no "plaintiff" in an IPR, and no local-counsel requirement — the PTAB designations are simply lead counsel and back-up counsel under 37 C.F.R. § 42.10. I therefore list (A) counsel of record for Google/YouTube (the entities the metadata labels plaintiffs/petitioners) and (B) counsel of record for Realtime (the nominal district-court plaintiff) for completeness. No counsel of record in this proceeding appears under seal; all identifications below come from public PTAB filings.

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A. Counsel of record for Google LLC and YouTube, LLC (petitioners / metadata "plaintiffs")

Firm: Paul Hastings LLP, Washington, D.C. (then at 875 15th St. N.W.; the firm's D.C. office has since moved to 2050 M Street N.W.). Service address for this family of cases: PH-Google-Realtime-IPR@paulhastings.com.

In-house: the petitioner's power of attorney in this family was executed by Renny Hwang, Director, Litigation, Google LLC — an in-house signatory, not counsel of record.

Key sourcing / caveats.

• The full text of the petitioners' power of attorney I was able to retrieve is the one filed May 6, 2019 in the companion IPR2019-01033 (Paper 2), which names Modi (lead), Palys, Citroën and Zeilberger — docketalarm copy. The four Google–Realtime petitions (-01033, -01035, -01036, and the earlier -00786) were filed the same day by the same team under the same service e-mail.
• The commercial docket aggregator for IPR2019-01036 independently lists "Petitioner Counsel: Naveen Modi" — ipverse.greyb.com IPR2019-01036; the PTACTS document set for the '036 petition is petition 1525803.
• The Munger, Tolles & Olson team (Ted Dane, Peter A. Detre, Peter E. Gratzinger, Heather E. Takahashi, Zachary M. Briers, Brian J. Springer) appeared only in the C.D. Cal. action, not before the Board. The previously generated section's phrasing ("Munger, Tolles & Olson … with Naveen Modi leading the PTAB petitions") is correct in substance, but note for accuracy that Modi is Paul Hastings, not MTO — the two firms split the district-court and PTAB work.

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B. Counsel of record for Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC (patent owner; plaintiff in the parallel C.D. Cal. action)

Firm: Russ August & Kabat, 12424 Wilshire Blvd., 12th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90025 (service: rak.realtimedata@raklaw.com). Per Realtime's Updated Power of Attorney dated February 3, 2020, expressly covering IPR2019-01036 ('298 patent) along with -01033 and -01035:

District-court-only RAK counsel of record in No. 2:18-cv-03629 (not on the '036 PTAB papers): Marc A. Fenster, Brian D. Ledahl, Paul Kroeger.

Sourcing / caveats.

• Realtime's Feb. 3, 2020 Updated POA is filed as Paper 15 in IPR2019-01035 and captions "Case IPR2019-01033 … Case IPR2019-01036 (Patent 9,578,298)" — docketalarm record. The aggregator for -01036 lists "Respondent Counsel: Philip Wang," consistent with the POA.
• Notably, Noroozi PC (Kayvan B. Noroozi, Joel P.N. Stonedale) appeared as back-up counsel for Realtime in the Netflix Realtime IPRs (e.g., IPR2018-01630) but not in the Google -01033/-01035/-01036 line; and Baker Botts (Harper Batts, Eliot Williams, Jennifer Nall) represented the Netflix/Hulu/Amazon petitioners, not Google. Do not conflate the two petitioner-side teams.
• The patent's prosecution correspondence address of record — Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox P.L.L.C., Washington, D.C. — appears in the '036 certificate of service as the attorney of record on PAIR; that is prosecution counsel, not litigation/PTAB counsel.
• I did not independently retrieve the -01036-specific petitioner POA PDF (the PTACTS artifact link resolved to other '036 papers, including Patent Owner's demonstratives). The -01033 POA plus the shared service e-mail, shared filing date and the aggregator entry make the Modi/Palys/Citroën/Zeilberger identification for -01036 highly reliable, but if a signed -01036 POA is needed as an exhibit, it should be pulled from PTACTS petition 1525803 → "Power of Attorney."

Cross-reference flag: the prior section's statement that Realtime's counsel is Russ August & Kabat with Philip X. Wang as lead PTAB counsel "per its updated power of attorney in IPR2019-01033/-01035/-01036" is confirmed and can be cited to Paper 15 in IPR2019-01035 (Feb. 3, 2020). The prior section's caution about the substance of the Nov. 10, 2020 FWD in -01036 remains open on my searches and is unaffected by anything found here.

I'll research the counsel of record for both sides, since this IPR's "defendant" side needs to be mapped carefully (Google/YouTube are defendants in the underlying C.D. Cal. action but petitioners here).

I have the key IPR counsel data. Now let me pin down the IPR2019-01036-specific papers, any counsel changes, and the district court appearances.

Now let me verify the IPR2019-01036 docket documents (counsel changes) and the district court appearances, plus the disposition.

Counsel of record — role mapping (read this first)

IPR2019-01036 has no "defendant": Google LLC and YouTube, LLC are the petitioners, and Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC is the patent owner/respondent. The "defendants" in the underlying infringement action — Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Google LLC and YouTube, LLC, No. 2:18-cv-03629-GW-JC (C.D. Cal.) — are Google and YouTube. Because the question asks for defense-side counsel "in this patent infringement case," this section covers (A) Google/YouTube's PTAB counsel of record in IPR2019-01036, (B) Google/YouTube's district-court counsel of record in the C.D. Cal. action, and (C) Realtime's PTAB counsel, since Realtime is the responding party in this proceeding and the two sides are frequently confused given the role reversal between forums.

Correction to the earlier section. The case overview states that "Google's district-court counsel is Munger, Tolles & Olson, with Naveen Modi leading the PTAB petitions." The second clause should be read with a firm correction: Naveen Modi is a Paul Hastings LLP partner, not Munger Tolles. The two firms are cleanly split — Paul Hastings (Washington, D.C.) handles the PTAB/IPR and Federal Circuit work; Munger, Tolles & Olson (Los Angeles/San Francisco) handles the C.D. Cal. litigation.

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A. Google LLC and YouTube, LLC — PTAB counsel of record, IPR2019-01036

All from Paul Hastings LLP, Washington, D.C., under the consolidated service address PH-Google-Realtime-IPR@paulhastings.com. Source: "Power of Attorney for Petitioner" filed May 6, 2019 (Paper 1 in IPR2019-01036; same POA filed in the companion IPRs), and the petition's Counsel and Service Information section.

Notes and caveats. (1) The '298 petition's counsel block lists Modi (lead) with Palys, Bansal and Heidemann as back-up, while the consolidated Power of Attorney filed in the sister Realtime IPRs (IPR2019-01033/-01035) lists Modi with Palys, Citroen and Zeilberger — I could not retrieve a clean, IPR2019-01036-specific updated POA adding or dropping names, so treat the full Paul Hastings group as the practical team of record. (2) No Google or YouTube in-house attorney appears as counsel of record; the petitioner POA was executed by Renny Hwang, Director, Litigation (Google), who is the client signatory, not counsel. (3) There is no separate "local counsel" in the PTAB proceeding — Paul Hastings is the sole firm of record for petitioners.

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B. Google LLC and YouTube, LLC — counsel of record, C.D. Cal. No. 2:18-cv-03629-GW-JC

All from Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, appearing on the signature block as "Attorneys for Defendants Google LLC and YouTube, LLC" (e.g., the May 2, 2019 Joint Stipulation to Stay Case Pending Inter Partes Review).

Notes and caveats. (1) These four are the attorneys whose names appear on the Google/YouTube filing in this case that I could retrieve; I did not pull the full PACER appearance list, so additional MTO appearances (or withdrawals) may exist. (2) Unlike many C.D. Cal. cases, there is no separate local-counsel firm — MTO's Los Angeles office serves that function. (3) No Google in-house litigation counsel appears of record in the district court docket as reflected in the retrieved filings. (4) As noted in the prior section, the C.D. Cal. action was stayed May 2, 2019, which is why the MTO appearances are thin and keyed to the stay and claim-construction papers (Doc. 92, July 25, 2019).

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C. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC — PTAB counsel of record, IPR2019-01036 (responding party)

Included for completeness because Realtime is the party answering the petition in this proceeding, and because its counsel is often mislabeled as "defendant's counsel" in aggregators (ipverse, for example, labels Philip Wang "Respondent Counsel"). Source: Realtime's Updated Power of Attorney dated Jan. 29, 2020 and filed Feb. 3, 2020 (Paper 13), and Patent Owner's filings through the Aug. 6, 2020 demonstratives.

Litigation-side Realtime counsel of record in C.D. Cal. (from the petitioner's May 6, 2019 certificate of courtesy service and the RAK signature block on the C.D. Cal. filings): Marc A. Fenster, Reza Mirzaie, Brian D. Ledahl, Paul Kroeger, C. Jay Chung and Philip X. Wang, all of Russ, August & Kabat, Los Angeles. Fenster is RAK's co-founder and the long-time lead outside counsel for the Realtime Data/Realtime Adaptive Streaming campaign; Kroeger argued for Realtime at the Federal Circuit in No. 2021-1545.

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Sourcing and verification flags

• Petitioner-side PTAB counsel is grounded in the filed Power of Attorney for Petitioner (May 6, 2019) and the IPR2019-01036 petition's § 42.8 counsel/service block, both retrieved via ptacts.uspto.gov petition 1525803 and the docketalarm copy filed in IPR2019-01033.
• Realtime-side PTAB counsel is grounded in Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC's Updated Power of Attorney (Paper 13, Feb. 3, 2020), whose caption text carries the IPR2019-01036 / Patent 9,578,298 header, and in Patent Owner's Updated Exhibit List (Aug. 6, 2020).
• District-court defense counsel are grounded in the Google/YouTube signature block on the Joint Stipulation to Stay Case Pending Inter Partes Review (Doc. filed May 2, 2019), reproduced as an exhibit in the IPR record (Ex. 1012).
• Not verified: the complete PACER appearance/withdrawal history in C.D. Cal. No. 2:18-cv-03629, and whether any MTO or Paul Hastings attorney formally withdrew before the stay. No filings in this matter appear to be sealed as to counsel identity — the counsel data comes from public papers — but I could not run a PACER docket report, so a final confirmation against the C.D. Cal. docket and PTAB Patent Center "counsel of record" listing is advisable before publication.
• Still open from the prior section: the substantive outcome of the Nov. 10, 2020 FWD (docketed in the patexia docket as Paper 32, "Termination Decision Document") and whether Realtime appealed IPR2019-01036. The July 21, 2021 certificate date is consistent with a § 318(b) certificate following a written decision that cancelled at least some of claims 1-4, 7-11 and 13, but I did not retrieve the decision text or the certificate, and the separate Netflix IPR2018-01227 FWD had upheld claims 1-19 — so the Google outcome should not be inferred from the certificate alone.