In re Amazon.com Services LLC

In re Amazon.com Services LLC The Federal Circuit denied Amazon's mandamus petition seeking to compel the Eastern District of Texas to stay the Headwater infringement case under the customer-suit exception. Amazon did not show a clear and indisputable right to a stay, and the district court's traditional stay-factor analysis was within its discretion. Customer-suit stays are hard to obtain by mandamus when the case includes a patent or accused product not at issue in the supplier's case, and a severance-and-stay alternative raised only in a footnote is unlikely to carry mandamus review. Petition denied. Headwater sued Google in W.D. Tex. (later transferred to N.D. Cal.) over Google's FCM system on the '117 patent, and sued Amazon in E.D. Tex. over Amazon's ADM push messaging system on the '117 and '571 patents, plus Amazon's use of FCM with its own software on the '117 patent. Amazon moved to stay its entire case under the customer-suit exception; the district court adopted the magistrate judge's recommendation to deny the stay over Amazon's objections. The court held a stay was not compelled because two patents are asserted and one ('571) is not asserted against Google, and because ADM relates only to Amazon while the FCM theory also involves Amazon-specific applications and software. The district court also applied the traditional stay factors and found the Google case would not sufficiently simplify the Amazon case; the Federal Circuit would not call that so far outside its docket-management discretion as to warrant mandamus. Amazon's alternative request to sever and stay the FCM claims appeared only in a footnote, and the court found no clear and indisputable right to relief on that request, citing In re ZTE. injunction / stay standing / jurisdiction infringement waiver / forfeiture non-precedential