"Federal Circuit has denied this pair of related mandamus actions. In both cases, the patentee VirtaMove challenged venue transfer orders moving its patent infringement suits from the Western District of Texas to the Northern District of California. As I discuss below, the non-precedential decisions have some interesting jurisdictional tension with recent Fifth Circuit law. VirtaMove is a small Canadian software company holding patents on secure application containerization technology."
"28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) provides that "[f]or the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice, a district court may transfer any civil action to any other district or division where it might have been brought." I think of this as the "convenient forum rule" which is separate and distinct from the "proper" venue requirements of §§ 1391 and 1400(b)."
VirtaMove, a small Canadian software company holding patents on secure application containerization, sued Google LLC and Amazon Web Services in the Midland/Odessa Division of the Western District of Texas for patent infringement. Both defendants moved to transfer venue under 28 U.S.C. §1404(a). The district courts found the Northern District of California more convenient mainly because defendants' engineers working on the accused products are concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area. VirtaMove argued the courts misapplied governing law by following Federal Circuit precedent rather than recent Fifth Circuit authority asserting heightened standards for transfer. The Federal Circuit denied related mandamus petitions, creating jurisdictional tension with Fifth Circuit law.
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