Judge Paul Engelmayer
Aeritas LLC, the owner of two patents that describe and claim methods and systems for facilitating wireless e-commerce transactions, sued three airlines, alleging that the mobile boarding pass and mobile check-in devices used by those airlines infringed Aeritas’s patents. Aeritas later filed two similar additional suits in the same district against two other airlines. The instant controversy arose out of the bankruptcy proceedings of debtor airline AMR Corporation, which commenced its bankruptcy proceedings during the interval between the two sets of Aeritas lawsuits. Aeritas brought a motion to withdraw the court’s reference to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of Aeritas’s claims of patent infringement against debtor AMR and certain of AMR’s direct and indirect subsidiaries and affiliates. The court denied Aeritas’s motion without prejudice, determining that a motion to withdraw the reference is premature at this stage of the proceedings. The court noted that the debtor has not yet responded to Aeritas’s proof of claim. The court added that to withdraw a bankruptcy reference, there must be a proceeding in the bankruptcy court to be withdrawn, such as a contested matter between a debtor and a creditor.
