Express Mobile, Inc. has filed a slew of new cases in its patent litigation campaign, which has been targeting web authoring tools since April 2015. The complaints have been filed in either the District of Delaware or the Northern District of California, alleging infringement by nearly two dozen companies over their use of Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and/or WordPress. A Markman hearing in a declaratory judgment action, filed by X.Commerce (d/b/a Magento) in the Northern District of California, was held in May 2018. The court sought post-hearing briefing on previously construed or agreed-upon terms, in response to which the parties submitted the constructions of the Eastern District of Texas in a February 2018 order from a case consolidated across multiple defendants there. District Judge Richard Seeborg has yet to issue a claim construction ruling.

In response to multiple lawsuits against "solution partners", Magento filed its May 2017 complaint in California, seeking declaratory judgments of noninfringement and invalidity of the two patents asserted in the NPE's most recent complaints (6,546,397; 7,594,168). The court denied Express Mobile's motion to dismiss for pleading inadequacies, after which the NPE answered, in October 2017.

Prior to the Texas court's claim construction order, KTree sought to invalidate the asserted claims of the patents-in-suit under Alice. KTree argued that those claims are patent-ineligibly directed to the abstract idea of "collecting, displaying, storing, and manipulating data". The magistrate recommended denial of the motion without prejudice to later refiling, having not been "persuaded that claim construction and a fuller factual record would be unhelpful to the patent eligibility determination". Express Mobile dismissed its claims against KTree without prejudice roughly a month after that May 2017 opinion.

BigCommerce, also sued in the Eastern District of Texas, filed a motion to transfer to the Northern District of California, which that court denied. The Eastern District of Texas also denied an analogous motion in a parallel case brought by Diem LLC. BigCommerce asked the Federal Circuit to issue a writ of mandamus reversing the denials, which the Federal Circuit did, leading to the transfer of the BigCommerce case to California, as well as, apparently, to the filing of even more Express Mobile cases outside of Texas.

Express Mobile is based in Marin County but was formed in Delaware in September 2006. It registered to do business in Texas (as Xpressmo, Inc.) a few days before launching this campaign with an April 2015 suit, filed against Alibaba. The plaintiff's certificates of interested parties identify only Express Mobile itself.

Visit RPX Insight for additional background on Express Mobile's formation and management.

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