Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-cand-3_14-cv-02868/USCOURTS-cand-3_14-cv-02868-7/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 830
Nature of Suit: Patent
Cause of Action: 35:271 Patent Infringement

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United States District Court

Northern District of California

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA

ALTERA CORPORATION,

Plaintiff,

v.

PACT XPP TECHNOLOGIES, AG,

Defendant.

Case No. 14-cv-02868-JD 

ORDER GRANTING IN PART AND 

DENYING IN PART MOTION TO 

AMEND INVALIDITY CONTENTIONS

Re: Dkt. No. 133

In this patent infringement declaratory judgment action, Altera, the declaratory judgment 

plaintiff and accused infringer, moves to amend its invalidity contentions. The Court grants the 

motion in part and denies it in part. 

I. FACTUAL BACKGROUND

This case was filed by Altera in this district on June 20, 2014. See Dkt. No. 1. On 

November 19, 2014, PACT, as the patentee and party asserting infringement, served its initial 

infringement contentions, as required by Patent Local Rule 3-1. See Declaration of Karl Kramer ¶ 

4, Dkt. No. 134. After reviewing Altera’s source code, PACT served amended infringement 

contentions on December 22, 2014. See id. ¶ 5. The next day, it served supplemental 

interrogatory responses, in which it asserted earlier priority dates for the asserted patent claims 

than it had previously. See Supplemental Response to Altera Interrogatory No. 2, Dkt. No. 139-3. 

It proceeded to file a motion to amend its infringement contentions on January 8, 2015, see Dkt. 

No. 56, which the Court granted on February 19, 2015, see Dkt. No. 100.

Altera served its initial invalidity contentions pursuant to Patent Local Rule 3-3 on January 

5, 2015. Kramer Decl. ¶ 7. It then served a subpoena on third party Rambus on January 7, 2015; 

according to Altera, Rambus produced its documents in two waves, the first on January 30, 2015, 

and the second on February 26, 2015. See id. ¶ 10.

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Altera served amended invalidity contentions on March 24, 2015, in which it modified 33 

of the 55 claim charts included in its original set of contentions. See id. ¶ 11. After failing to 

obtain PACT’s agreement to all of its changes, it filed this motion for leave to amend its invalidity 

contentions on April 15, 2015. See Dkt. No. 33.

II. LEGAL STANDARD

This district’s Local Patent Rules allow amending infringement contentions “only by order 

of the Court upon a timely showing of good cause.” See Patent L.R. 3-6. A precondition to 

demonstrating good cause is “a showing that the party seeking leave to amend acted with diligence 

in promptly moving to amend when new evidence is revealed in discovery.” O2 Micro Int’l Ltd. 

v. Monolithic Power Systems, Inc., 467 F.3d 1355, 1363 & 1366 (Fed. Cir. 2006). If diligence is 

shown, then the moving party must also demonstrate that the other party will not be prejudiced by 

the amendment. See Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. v. TWi Pharmaceuticals, Inc., No. 13-cv02420-LHK, 2015 WL 1227817, at *6-7 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 17, 2015).

III. DISCUSSION

Altera’s proposed amendments fall into four categories: correction of “obvious errors”; 

amendments allegedly responsive to PACT’s amended infringement contentions; amendments in 

response to the earlier priority dates PACT disclosed on December 23, 2014; and adding language 

that was inadvertently omitted in the charts dealing with claim 17 of U.S. Patent No. 6,119,181. 

PACT does not oppose the amendments in the first category, so those changes are permitted. 

A. Responses to PACT’s Amended Infringement Contentions

The changes that Altera claims are justified by the amended infringement contentions 

PACT served on December 22, 2014, are limited to the addition of language dealing with the 

Altera Application Briefs 113 and 114 references, the Altera Flex 10K Datasheet reference, and 

the Altera 1995 Databook reference to the portion of Exhibit F.2 of its invalidity contentions 

dealing with claim 11 of U.S. Patent No. 7,565,525. See Amended Invalidity Contentions at 1687, 

1772-74, Dkt. No. 138-3. (Altera also seeks to make changes to Exhibits F.4 and F.5, but PACT 

does not oppose these so the Court allows them.) Altera claims that the functionality described in 

the new citations is similar to aspects of Altera’s devices that were cited for the first time in 

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PACT’s amended infringement contentions.

A comparison of PACT’s amended contentions with Altera’s suggests that the proposed 

amendments to Exhibit F.2 can fairly be characterized as responsive to PACT’s changes. As the 

Court told the parties at the February 18, 2015, hearing in this case, such responsive amendments 

would be permitted. See Feb. 18, 2015, Hearing Tr. 15:14-20, Dkt. No. 131.

The Court is concerned about why Altera took three months after PACT’s amended 

infringement contentions to serve amended invalidity contentions. See O2 Micro, 467 F.3d at

1367 (affirming district court’s holding that three months delay showed lack of diligence); 

Verinata Health, Inc. v. Sequenom, Inc., No. C 12-00865 SI, 2014 WL 789197, at *3 (N.D. Cal. 

Feb. 26, 2014) (holding that a delay of “almost three months” was improper); Apple, Inc. v. 

Samsung Elecs. Co., Ltd., No. 11-cv-01846-LHK, 2012 WL 1067548, at *2 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 27, 

2012) (finding “over two and a half months” too long). But see Nuance Comm’ns, Inc. v. Abbyy 

Software House, C 08-02912 JSW (MEJ), 2012 WL 2427160, at * 2 (N.D. Cal. June 26, 2012) 

(finding a “few months” diligent); Vasudevan Software, Inc. v. Int’l Bus. Machines Corp., No. 

C09-05897 RS (HRL), 2011 WL 940263, at *3-4 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 18, 2011) (finding four months 

diligent). Altera says it held off so that it could combine these changes with other additions based 

on the completion of Rambus’s production, which are addressed below, and because it did not 

know until February 19, 2015, that the Court would allow PACT’s proposed amended contentions.

It is generally good practice to move to amend contentions on a rolling basis (or at least to 

serve each set of changes as it’s completed) to minimize prejudice to the other party and to avoid 

conflating the diligence inquiry for multiple sets of amendments. But in this specific case, given 

the Court’s prior indication that it would allow responsive changes, the fact that some courts in 

this district have permitted delays of similar length, and Altera’s desire to move with respect to all 

its amendments at one go, the Court excuses a delay that might otherwise be fatal to Altera’s claim 

of diligence. The Court also finds that the amendment is not prejudicial because they preceded the 

deadline for PACT's opening claim construction brief by several weeks, giving PACT enough 

time to incorporate any necessary changes into its claim construction positions. The amendments 

in this category are permitted.

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B. Responses to PACT’s New Priority Dates

The newly-added citations in Altera’s second category are asserted to be in response to the 

new priority dates PACT asserted in its December 23, 2014, supplemental interrogatory 

responses.1 The new references, like the parts of Gaul, are three in number: German Patent 

Application DE 44 16 881 A1, by Martin Vorbach, one of the named inventors on the patents-insuit; Ralph D. Wittig, OneChip: An FGPA Processor with Reconfigureable Logic (1995); and the 

Rambus ASIC Cell User Guide and Specification (1993).

The problem is that each of these would have been relevant prior art even under PACT’s 

initial claimed priority date, and could, and probably should, have been included in Altera’s initial 

infringement contentions. Altera’s rejoinder is that “[t]he Wittig and Rambus references were 

added to strengthen existing references that predate PACT’s new priority dates” and “[t]he 

Vorbach reference was added to replace an existing reference that may not predate PACT’s new 

priority dates.” See Altera’s Reply at 6:24-25, Dkt. No. 157. What Altera means by that is 

completely unclear. Altera had nothing to lose by charting the references in the first place. 

Presumably, a party asserting invalidity would want each of their theories to be as strong as 

possible, even if it thought it had other, more squarely on-point theories that depended on later art. 

It would be one thing if Altera, on finding out PACT's earlier alleged date of conception, renewed 

its search for prior art that predated the new date and as a result turned up the three references. 

But that is not what Altera says happened here: Altera does not claim that it found the three 

references it seeks to add for the first time after PACT’s amended infringement contentions were 

served. In fact, Altera doesn’t say when it came upon the Wittig reference at all, which is a 

necessary precondition to determining whether it was diligent in amending its contentions to 

include it. And it is clear that Altera knew about the Vorbach application even before PACT 

disclosed its new priority date, since it was cited in its initial invalidity contentions. See Proposed 

Amended Invalidity Contentions at 7, Dkt. No. 135-1. Leave to add the proposed citations to the 

 

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PACT claims that the relevant priority dates were made known to Altera before December 23 

through its earlier document productions. That does not hold water: Altera is entitled to be told 

what priority dates PACT claims for its own asserted patents, and not be forced to divine it from a 

document production.

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Vorbach and Wittig references that fall into this category is denied.

The situation with respect to the Rambus reference is unclear. Altera does not specifically 

say when it obtained the reference, but the fact that it was one of the documents Altera requested 

in its January 7, 2015, subpoena to Rambus suggests that it did not have a copy when it served its 

initial invalidity contentions. See Altera Subpoena to Rambus at PDF p. 8, Dkt. No. 159-1. If so, 

Altera will be permitted to add citations to this reference for the reasons given with respect to the 

third category, addressed below. If not, leave is denied for the same reasons given for the Vorbach 

and Wittig references.

C. Documents Obtained from Rambus

The third category of edits Altera seeks to make consists of citations to documents 

obtained from Rambus via subpoena. The subpoena was served on January 7, 2015, and 

Rambus’s production was completed on February 26, 2015. See Kramer Decl. ¶ 10.

PACT’s main argument against these proposed changes is that Altera could have issued its 

subpoena earlier. Maybe so, but it could also legitimately have felt that the subpoena was 

necessary only when PACT disclosed its new priority dates on December 23, 2014. It is 

understandable that the earlier priority dates would affect Altera’s calculus in deciding whether to 

issue a subpoena, since in making that decision, Altera was bound to balance the potential value of 

Rambus’s production against the downside of putting a third party to the trouble of dredging up 

documents relevant to technologies that might end up being irrelevant.

The Court finds that the gap of slightly less than one month between the completion of 

Rambus’s production and the service of the amended invalidity contentions is not a sign of 

indolence, and finds no prejudice. Leave to add citations to the Rambus-produced documents is 

granted.

D. Correcting Errors in Charts for Claim 17 of the ’181 Patent

The final category of proposed changes seeks to add certain citations and language that the 

parties apparently agree was inadvertently omitted from Altera’s initial charts. What appears to 

have happened is that Altera’s initial charts misquoted the first element of the claim and then 

based the charted invalidity theory on the incorrectly-quoted element. See, e.g., Proposed 

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Amended Invalidity Contentions at 499-500, Dkt. No. 136-1. Altera claims in briefing that it 

discovered the error on March 7, 2015. See Dkt. No. 157 at 8:24-26. Cases in this district are split 

on whether correcting an inadvertent error is consistent with diligence. Compare West v. Jewelry 

Innovs., Inc., No. C 07-1812 JF (HRL), 2008 WL 4532558, at *4 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 8, 2008) and

Berger v. Rossignol Ski Co., Inc., No. C 05-02523 CRB, 2006 WL 1095914 at *5 (N.D. Cal. Apr.

25, 2006) with Apple, Inc. v. Samsung Elecs. Co., No. CV 12-00630 LHK (PSG), 2012 WL 

5632618, at *5 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 15, 2012). Since PACT does not suggest any bad faith on Altera’s 

part, and sinking an invalidity theory due to an honest if careless mistake is a harsh result, the 

Court allows the correction.

IT IS SO ORDERED. 

Dated: June 19, 2015

________________________

JAMES DONATO

United States District Judge

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