Google Inc. and its lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan have lost an early bid to knock out patent infringement claims by Rockstar Consortium, the Apple Inc.-backed group that snatched up Nortel Networks Inc.’s patent portfolio in a 2011 auction.
In a ruling issued on Monday, U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap in Marshall, Texas, refused to dismiss claims related to two former Nortel patents that Rockstar asserted against Google last year. Siding with Rockstar’s lawyers at McKool Smith, Gilstrap swiftly rejected Google’s arguments that Rockstar’s infringement claims are too vague and that one of the patents, which covers a “system for notifying a user of an incoming communication,” covers a patent-ineligible abstract idea.
