The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has moved to challenge the systematic sealing of court records in the Eastern District of Texas. The case, Wilus Institute of Standards and Technology Inc. v. HP Inc., involves patents essential to Wi-Fi 6 technology. Logging this for the record.
The Eastern District of Texas has long served as a high-volume hub for patent litigation. It is a venue characterized by procedural efficiency and, increasingly, a disregard for the presumption of public access to judicial records. In the Wilus case, the court allowed significant portions of the litigation to be conducted entirely behind closed doors. This was not a matter of redacting sensitive trade secrets; it was a wholesale removal of legal arguments from the public ledger.
The dispute centers on "standard essential patents" (SEPs). These are the technical foundations required for devices to communicate across modern networks. Because these technologies are essential, holders of such patents are typically bound by FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) licensing obligations. This framework is designed to prevent patent holders from extracting "hold-up" rents that would stifle the adoption of global standards.
The NYU School of Law’s Technology Law and Policy Clinic, representing the EFF, found that key filings regarding these obligations were hidden from view. This goes in the incident report.
The documentation shows that district judges in this jurisdiction frequently allow litigants to bypass the requirement for document-by-document justification for secrecy. Instead, they accept boilerplate protective orders. In Wilus, two critical sets of documents were completely sealed without redacted public versions. The first involved Samsung’s challenge to Wilus’s standing—essentially asking if Wilus actually owns the patents it is using to sue. The second involved HP’s arguments regarding Wilus’s failure to offer FRAND terms.
The public interest in these documents is not theoretical. Wilus is a non-practicing entity (NPE), a firm that exists to litigate rather than manufacture. When an NPE seeks to control the terms of a global standard like Wi-Fi 6, the legal basis for their ownership and their compliance with licensing fairness is a matter of public policy.
Following pressure from the EFF, Wilus agreed to release redacted versions of several documents. However, the redactions remain heavy. The public is still unable to see the core of the arguments that will determine how a ubiquitous technology is taxed and controlled.
The record will show that transparency in these proceedings is currently being treated as an optional concession rather than a constitutional requirement. When courts act as private forums for business disputes, they cease to function as public institutions. The erasure of the paper trail in patent cases allows for a "shadow" regulatory environment where the rules for essential technology are written by whoever has the highest tolerance for legal fees and the lowest requirement for public scrutiny.
Note for the archive: The standard is public by definition; the litigation should be as well.
