Express Mobile v. Dropbox: one of nine tech giants sued over web-design patents
2020–2021
Express Mobile sued Dropbox along with eight other technology companies over website-builder patents in 2020; the suit against Dropbox was resolved by dismissal, consistent with a settlement, rather than a court ruling on the merits.
What happened
In September 2020 Express Mobile, Inc. filed a wave of patent-infringement suits against nine technology companies simultaneously — a group that, alongside Dropbox, included Google, Microsoft, eBay, Expedia, HubSpot, Facebook, Atlassian, and Squarespace. The complaints asserted Express Mobile's family of website-builder and web-design patents (publicly itemized as U.S. Patent Nos. 6,546,397; 7,594,168; 9,063,755; 9,471,287; and 9,928,044), though the exact subset asserted against Dropbox is not separately confirmed.
The Dropbox case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas (No. 6:20-cv-00806) and then proceeded in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (No. 3:21-cv-01145) before Chief Judge Richard Seeborg.
The Express Mobile case against Dropbox was resolved by dismissal — consistent with a settlement — rather than by a judgment on infringement or a patent-eligibility ruling. The precise terms and date are not public.
Impact
The suit was part of a broad assertion campaign in which a single patent owner targeted many of the largest technology companies at once, and it added Dropbox to the long list of defendants drawn into the Western District of Texas before the dispute moved to California. Its quiet, terms-confidential resolution is typical of how such multi-defendant campaigns wind down.
Sources
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