Amazon Alleges Its Patent Accuser Runs Series of ‘Shell Companies’

The renewed application from Chinese company Sailed Technology asking the U.S. District Court for Western Washington to compel discovery from Amazon for a patent infringement case in China is the culmination of “a seven-year litigation campaign against Amazon, consisting of dozens of lawsuits in China and three lawsuits here in the U.S.,” said Amazon’s response Monday (docket 2:22-cv-01396). Sailed seeks to serve subpoenas on Amazon for deposition testimony and documents connected with a case brought in an intellectual property court in Nanjing, China, in which Amazon Echo and Fire products are alleged to have infringed one or more Sailed patents (see 2210110001).

Sailed is one of several “shell companies operated by a patent speculator named Anne Wang and her family members,” said Amazon. Wang has filed more than 70 lawsuits in the U.S. and China targeting Amazon technology, and the litigation has been “remarkably unsuccessful,” it said. One case Wang brought in the Eastern District of Virginia “was so ‘exceptionally weak’ and ‘baseless’” that the district court ordered Wang’s shell company, Innovation Sciences, to pay Amazon more than $700,000 in attorney fees, it said.

Efforts to reach Wang or her representatives Tuesday were unsuccessful. Sailed is scheduled to file a reply in the case by Friday.

Wang has now “shifted her focus abroad, filing lawsuits in China in the name of Sailed, and she has still not prevailed in a single case,” said Amazon. The Chinese courts dismissed 19 of her cases for “lack of prosecution,” it said. “Sailed simply stopped responding to the Chinese courts and did not show up to scheduled court dates. As it abandoned these cases, Sailed also filed dozens of new cases in courts across China.” Amazon successfully petitioned the Supreme Court of China to consolidate these lawsuits before a single court in Nanjing, it said.

Sailed now asks the Western District of Washington to issue two subpoenas to Amazon for discovery “it claims to need for the consolidated campaign before the Nanjing court,” said Amazon. “But Sailed admits that it did not even request this discovery through the Chinese courts.” U.S. case law “counsels in favor of denying the application outright,” it said. “Amazon is already a party to many of the Chinese litigations and subject to discovery there, and is in the process of consolidating and intervening in the cases to which it is not already a party.”

Sailed can’t show that the Chinese courts handling these lawsuits “support intervention by U.S. courts,” said Amazon. Sailed seeks discovery from this court “to circumvent the discovery process in China, all while failing to prosecute its cases abroad,” it said. Sailed is requesting “unnecessary, irrelevant, and overly-burdensome discovery calculated to harass Amazon,” it said. The court should deny Sailed’s application “and direct it to pursue the discovery it seeks from the Chinese court that already oversees the underlying dispute,” it said.