VoIP-Pal Urges Federal Circuit to Deny Amazon’s Mandamus Petition

Respondent VoIP-Pal opposes Amazon’s petition for a writ of mandamus from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit directing U.S. District Judge Alan Albright for the Western District of Texas in Waco to vacate his orders denying Amazon’s transfer of a patent infringement action to the U.S. District Court for Northern California, said VoIP-Pal’s opposition brief Tuesday (docket 23-104). This Federal Circuit should deny Amazon’s petition and affirm the district court’s orders “because Amazon has not and cannot show that its request meets the high standard for mandamus relief,” it said. Amazon tried three times to convince the district court that the Northern District of California “is clearly the more convenient venue for this case,” it said. “Each time Amazon failed. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Amazon fails to show that its right to a writ of mandamus is clear and indisputable, much less that the writ is appropriate under the circumstances.” Amazon’s petition “hinges on the thin claim” that the district court misunderstood the role of the operating system “in the so-called call-initiation functionality” of its Alexa devices “that Amazon contends is accused of infringement,” said the brief. “But this claim is based on the false premise that VoIP-Pal’s infringement claims are based solely on call-initiation functionality. They are not.” Call-initiation functionality “is a term that Amazon concocted to try to narrow the pool of relevant witnesses to only those residing near its offices in Sunnyvale, California,” it said. It’s those witnesses “who allegedly develop middleware used by Amazon’s accused Alexa calling devices to communicate with other devices,” it said. VoIP-Pal’s infringement claims, however, “also expressly cover internal communications between the hardware components of the Alexa calling devices, which implicate Amazon’s Austin, Texas-based teams who design and develop the OS for these devices,” and weighs in favor of keeping the case in Waco, it said.