January 22, 2014 - A group of cable companies, including Charter Communications and several smaller companies, banded together to sue the Rockstar Consortium in U.S. District Court in Delaware for violating agreements to charge only Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) royalty rates for the Nortel patents. Rockstar had agreed at the time of its massive patent purchase in 2011 to honor the FRAND agreements made by Nortel regarding its patents.
This lawsuit was filed in response to some of Rockstar's litigious activities: In October, its subsidiary Constellation Technologies LLC sued Time Warner Cable, and threatened suit against other cable companies without naming the allegedly infringed patents.
Charter and its co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit - which include Knology, WOW! Internet, CableOne, Cequel Communications, and Suddenlink Communications - allege that Rockstar has engaged in underhanded tactics in order to avoid its FRAND commitments and make "exorbitant" damages demands.