The China Docket Report

As Futurewei and its parent company Huawei filed a lawsuit against their ex-principal engineer Yiren Ronnie Huang (“Ronnie”) in December 2017 (see our last post on this blog), Ronnie, in response, filed a lawsuit at a California state court against Futurewei and Huawei (collectively “Defendants”) to seek judicial relief from the compulsory assignment of his inventions to Defendants set forth in his employment contract with Defendants. Between January 2011 and May 2013, Ronnie was a principal engineer at Futurewei, specializing in R&D. Ronnie’s employment contract contains compulsory invention assignment provisions that are so broad that Ronnie was required to assign…

In 2011, Futurewei, a US subsidiary of the Chinese technology giant Huawei (collectively “Plaintiffs”), employed Yiren Ronnie Huang (“Ronnie”) as a Principal Engineer to assist in development of Solid-State Drive (“SSD”) and relevant high-tech fields. Ronnie signed an employment contract containing non-disclosure, non-compete and non-solicitation clauses. Plaintiffs alleged that despite his access to confidential information at Futurewei, Ronnie left the company in 2013 and opened his own company-CNEX Labs, which directly competes with Plaintiffs. Ronnie used Plaintiffs’ confidential information to improve SSD related technologies for CNEX and file patent applications and solicited employees from Plaintiffs. In December 2017, Plaintiffs sued…

The Japanese printer and ink cartridge giant Seiko Epson (or Epson), has previously filed numerous patent infringement actions in various district courts and the United States International Trade Commission, and successfully obtained two general exclusion orders that prohibit the importation of ink cartridges that infringe certain Epson patents. Nevertheless, ignoring the exclusion orders, certain alleged infringers continued to import and sell infringing ink cartridges, for which Epson filed this lawsuit. The Defendants are Ftrade Inc., a New York incorporated company operating its business under the name of Valuetoner, whose contact person, sole officer and general manager was a Chinese named…