Application of Fifth Circuit’s Heightened § 1404(a) Standard in Patent Cases
Patent – Patently-O 2025-09-11
Summary:
by Dennis Crouch
In re VirtaMove, Corp., No. 2025-130 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 11, 2025) (Google case); In re VirtaMove, Corp., No. 2025-138 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 11, 2025) (Amazon case).
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 As I discuss below, the non-precedential decisions have some interesting jurisdictional tension with recent Fifth Circuit law.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. VirtaMove sued Google LLC and Amazon Web Services in the Midland/Odessa Division of WDTX, alleging infringement of patents covering methods for migrating applications into portable, secure containers. Both defendants successfully moved to transfer under § 1404(a), with the district courts (Judge Counts in the Google case, Judge Albright in the Amazon case) finding that the Northern District of California was more convenient primarily due to the concentration of defendants' engineers involved in developing the accused products in the San Francisco Bay Area. VirtaMove's central argument on mandamus was that the district courts misapplied governing law by following Federal Circuit precedent rather than more recent Fifth Circuit authority that VirtaMove claimed established heightened standards for transfer.