The decision politely acknowledges the USPTO-DOJ submission, but there is no indication that the Statement of Interest moved the needle in this case before this judge.1
Context: Last fall, non-practicing entity (NPE) Collision Communications won a $445M damages verdict against Samsung in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (October 14, 2025 ip fray article). It moved for a permanent injunction. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) made a joint submission (the third in a series under the current administration) explaining why NPEs, too, may be entitled to injunctive relief depending on case-specific facts (February 28, 2026 ip fray article).
What’s new: On Monday (May 18, 2026)2, Judge Rodney Gilstrap denied Collision’s motion based on the third and fourth eBay factors, even though Collision would have satisfied the first two in his opinion. The outcome may suggest that it is not a landmark ruling, but as indicated in the headline and discussed below, there are two aspects that make it significant, especially in the event Collision appeals and the Federal Circuit agrees with those parts. But time is not on Collision’s side.
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Counsel for the private parties
Counsel for Collision: Caldwell Cassady & Curry’s Brad Caldwell, Chris Stewart, Justin Nemunaitis, Aisha Mahmood Haley, Austin Curry, Bailey Blaies, Hamad M Hamad, James Robert Perkins, James Smith, James Yang, Jason Cassady, John Summers, Robert Reich, and Alexander Gras, as well as Andrea Fair, Charles Everingham, and Garrett Parish of Miller Fair Henry.
Counsel for Samsung: Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan’s Austin Buscher, Brady Huynh, Brian E Mack, Brice Lynch, John Thomas McKee, Joseph Reed, Kevin Hardy, Nagendra Setty, Olga Slobodyanyuk, Patrick James Stafford, Sean S. Pak, and Victoria Fishman Maroulis, as well as Gillam & Smith’s Melissa Richards Smith.
- This case ultimately turned on the eBay factors the USPTO-DOJ did not focus on in that particular submission. The Statement of Interest suggested that courts should not make it too hard for NPEs to satisfy the third and fourth factors if a tailored injunction might be equitable and allow market dynamics to determine the value of the technology at issue. But that part of the Statement of Interest was little more than an afterthought and didn’t end up helping Collision. Judge Gilstrap did not (at least not explicitly) reject any of the USPTO’s arguments on the first two factors, but the Statement of Interest did not lower the hurdle for them either: his conclusions would most likely have been the same, just based on existing Supreme Court and Federal Circuit case law. ↩︎
- The order was signed on Sunday (May 17) and uploaded to the docket on Monday. ↩︎