SIMO Holding Inc. ("SIMO") sued Defendants uCloudlink Network Technology Ltd. and uCloudlink (America), Ltd. (together, "uCloudlink") in June 2018, alleging infringement of SIMO's U.S. Patent No. 9,736,789 by a line of mobile WiFi hotspot devices and a mobile "world phone" sold by uCloudlink. In April 2019, Judge Jed S. Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.) granted SIMO's motion for summary judgment of infringement. At trial, a jury found that uCloudlink willfully infringed and awarded approximately $2.2 million in compensatory damages. The court thereafter applied a 30% damages enhancement for willfulness.
On August 29, 2019, the court granted SIMO's post-trial motion to supplement damages by including in the damages calculation international sales of "Daypasses" that are used with devices purchased in the United States. The court ordered uCloudlink to produce sales data for the Daypasses and, if it could not do so, to "brief the Court on next steps for estimating international damages in the absence of direct data."
uCloudlink maintained it did not track international data usage for devices sold domestically and argued that "any post-verdict method of calculating foreign damages absent [direct] data would violate its Seventh Amendment rights” to a jury trial. The Court disagreed. Citing uCloudlink's "history of obstructionist production tactics in this litigation," the court accepted SIMO's proposed calculation method for foreign damages: determine an average foreign data usage per device "by taking the total data used outside the United States during the infringing period and dividing it by the total number of devices sold and rented," and then multiplying that number "by the number of devices sold and rented in the United States to get an estimate of the foreign data use associated with the U.S.-based infringing activity." The court then ordered the parties to apply the reasonable royalty rate determined by the jury at trial to the estimate of foreign data provided by SIMO to arrive at the foreign damages figure.
Case: SIMO Holdings Inc. v. Hong Kong uCloudlink Network Tech. Ltd. et al., No. 18-CV-5427 (S.D.N.Y.).
