Watch Party Moves to N.D.Cal.

In re Netflix (Fed. Cir. 2022)

This was an easy mandamus transfer.  The plaintiffs, CA Inc. and Avago Technologies Int’l,  are both subsidiaries of Broadcom Corp. The plaintiffs are both headquartered in San Jose and Broadcom is down in Southern California.  Netflix is also Silicon Valley. Still, the plaintiffs sued Netflix for patent infringement in the Eastern District of Texas.  Although Netflix itself does not have a place of business in EDTex, the district court found that its intimate relationship with ISPs to provide local content delivery was sufficient.  The vast majority of Netflix content is delivered directly from local residential Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The district court also refused to transfer for inconvenient forum. Although N.D. California was certainly the locus-of-relevant-events, the court noted court congestion and access to evidence weighed against transfer.  Although the source code is located in N.D. California, the court saw no evidence showing that it would be difficult to get that data to Texas. Netflix does have more internet traffic than any other company, right!

On mandamus, the Federal Circuit only addressed the inconvenient forum question — ordering the case transferred.   The appellate panel particularly focused on the district court’s apparent bias against transferring venue.  In particular, the district court discounted Netflix arguments of evidence availability because Netflix did not “articulate the precise way that the evidence supports its claim or defense.”  At the same time, the court did not place the same precision requirement on CA regarding its evidence.  This bias was improper:

[W]e see no basis for reasonably demanding more from Netflix than it provided at this stage of the litigation, when a transfer motion must be filed and ruled on. . . . Nor have we been shown any reasons here to doubt that the documents and sources would be relevant and material to the issues here.

Id.