Which jurisdiction, Eastern Texas or Northern California, will oversee Apple’s proxy patent war with Google? Both of them, according to a new order from U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Marshall, Texas, who refused to cede the litigation to another judge in San Francisco.
Rockstar Consortium, a patent holder backed by Apple Inc. and other tech companies, paid a staggering $4.5 billion in 2011 to acquire a patent portfolio from bankrupt Nortel Networks. In October 2013, Rockstar asserted the former Nortel patents in Texas against phone makers that use Google’s Android operating system, including Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. Google Inc. responded with a declaratory judgment suit in San Francisco, seeking a ruling that it doesn’t infringe Rockstar’s patents.
