VL Collective IP, LLC

Earlier this month, NovaCloud Licensing LLC announced the launch of “a new licensing effort to provide more accessibility to patented technologies that are fundamental to driving innovations across the cloud computing and datacenter sectors”. The firm indicated in its press release that it has acquired “a foundational patent portfolio of cloud-based technologies” from Ericsson, which NovaCloud’s public website suggests has global reach, including 40 patent families and more than 40 US patents. Joe Chernesky and Bill Goldman, both behind VideoLabs, Inc., lead the NovaCloud team.

VideoLabs, Inc. has filed a pair of complaints against HP, one in the Western District of Texas (6:22-cv-01086) and another before the International Trade Commission (ITC) (337-TA-3650). These new pleadings follow complaints filed both in district court and before the ITC earlier this year against Acer, ASUSTek, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), and Micro-Star International, with the three patents asserted against HP also in suit against the prior defendants. VideoLabs targets the HP Envy x360 15 and Victus-series laptops over their alleged support of certain video codecs, including H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC), VP9, and/or AV1.

After initiating their sole litigation campaign in 2021 with separate cases against Dell and Lions Gate Entertainment (Starz Entertainment) and after expanding that campaign with early 2022 suits against Amazon and Netflix, VideoLabs, Inc. and its subsidiary VL Collective IP, LLC have added Meta Platforms (Facebook, Giphy, Instagram, WhatsApp) (1:22-cv-00680) to the fray. Five patents are asserted in the new Delaware complaint, which targets the provision of the Facebook website and app as well as various products and services related to messaging and streaming, targeting features related to video/audio coding or secure networking.

VideoLabs, Inc., together with its subsidiary VL Collective IP, LLC, has filed suit against Amazon (6:22-cv-00079) in the Western District of Texas, alleging infringement of seven patents through the provision of a wide array of products, including streaming systems and services, smart home devices, software, tablets, and TVs. At issue is the support of the H.264 and HLS streaming protocols, auto scaling, WebRTC and SRTP standards, and content flow control. The litigation will join prior affirmative disputes consolidated in the same district, also before District Judge Alan D. Albright, with Dell; a declaratory judgment action filed by Lions Gate Entertainment (Starz Entertainment) is underway in the District of Delaware.

Lions Gate Entertainment (Starz Entertainment) (1:21-cv-01448) has filed a complaint against VideoLabs, Inc. and its subsidiary VL Collective IP, LLC, asking the District of Delaware for declaratory judgments of noninfringement and invalidity of two patents held by each entity. Starz pleads that “[b]eginning in or about March 2021, [VideoLabs] asserted that Starz practiced certain claims” of those patents through the provision of its content management services, content bookmarking, MPEG-DASH streaming, and subscriber management services. VideoLabs has filed two affirmative infringement cases to date, now consolidated into a single Western District of Texas action against Dell.

Launched in late 2019 as a patent collective meant to “reduce the volume of one-off assertions and constant threat of litigation” in the video space, VideoLabs, Inc. has filed its first patent infringement suit, hitting Dell (6:21-cv-00456) in the Western District of Texas over former Panasonic patents received from an affiliate of NPE PanOptis Holdings, LLC.