A French government-sponsored patent assertion entity and its lawyers at McKool Smith have won a fight over their preferred U.S. battleground, persuading a judge to keep their patent infringement suit against HTC America Inc. and LG Electronics in the plaintiffs-friendly Eastern District of Texas.
The plaintiff, NFC Technology LLC, accuses HTC and LG of infringing two patents related to Near Field Communication capability, a technology that enables short-range interactions between devices. NFC is a creation of France Brevets, a patent acquisition and monetization company set up by the French government three years ago. France Brevets, which critics have attacked as a worrisome example of state-funded patent trolling, made its first (and so far only) foray into U.S. patent litigation in December 2013, when NFC sued HTC and LG in federal court in Marshall, Texas.
