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An Update on Patent Litigation, the Patent Marketplace, and New Cases
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Monday, November 17, 2025
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Patent Litigation Feature
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A set of US appellate decisions issued this past Monday were a mixed bag for Australian plaintiff CPC Patent Technologies, Ltd. In one opinion, a divided Federal Circuit reversed and remanded a pair of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decisions that invalidated claims from a CPC biometrics patent as obvious in inter partes reviews (IPRs) from defendant Assa Abloy. However, in another ruling, the appellate court summarily affirmed the PTAB’s invalidation of other claims from that same patent in an Apple IPR under Federal Circuit Rule 36—the same day that the US Supreme Court denied CPC’s certiorari petition that had challenged the Federal Circuit’s Rule 36 affirmance of PTAB rulings against two other patents. This all followed another notable development in this campaign late last year, when the Ninth Circuit denied, on jurisdictional grounds, Apple’s appeal of a ruling that it must provide information to CPC for use in a potential German patent case. The underlying discovery request invoked a US statutory mechanism that could see much greater use after recent developments that have expanded the reach of European courts.
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This past week, a trimmed-down patent case (8:20-cv-00048) filed by Masimo and Cercacor Laboratories against Apple produced a $634M verdict, returned by a Central District of California jury, for Masimo. The jury found four claims from a single Masimo patent infringed by accused versions of the Apple Watch providing a feature for alerting wearers to an abnormal heart rate under certain circumstances. Central to the case seems to have been whether an Apple Watch is a “patient monitor”, as recited in the tried claims.
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Patent Watch
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US patent assignments worth noting this week include a batch of 3D printing patents to an entity linked to an IP finance firm; more lighting patents on the move, including into the courthouse; and a growing set of networking patents transferred out of a research and development lab, other divestitures of which have resulted in recent litigation against the major US wireless carriers.
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Another plaintiff tied to the most prolific plaintiff operation over the past couple of years has filed a funding disclosure in connection with a case filed before Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly. There, the plaintiff adds itself to a growing list of those for which the same funder “provides funding for expenses to litigate [the] action on a non-recourse basis in exchange for a fixed financial percentage of any monetary recovery” but the approval of which is “not necessary for litigation or settlement decisions”. Notably, the same plaintiff has (as yet) failed to identify this funder in the Northern District of Texas as local rules require—there, Rabicoff Law LLC represents the plaintiff.
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New Patent Litigation
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In November 2024, Polaris Innovations Limited sued Qualcomm; so too this November (7:25-cv-00526), both times in the Western District of Texas. In the new complaint, Polaris Innovations targets with three former Infineon patents the provision of Snapdragon, 6, 7, 8, and X-series products that support LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X memory; Automotive platforms (e.g., Snapdragon Cockpit, Cockpit Elite, Ride, Ride Elite, and Ride Flex devices and modules) that support LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X memory; and/or IPQ series and Dragonwing Platform products that support DDR4 memory.
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In a Western District of Texas complaint, Vampire Labs, LLC has accused AMD (1:25-cv-01838) of infringing three patents generally related to a “functional unit control” system. Targeted is the implementation of “fine-grained power gating” in its “product lines within its Zen 3+ and later CPU architectures; the corresponding server/data center CPU architectures; its Baffin and later consumer/gaming GPU architectures; and the corresponding data center/computer GPU architectures”. The new complaint drops roughly one year after the inventor-controlled plaintiff sued Anker and Apple in separate complaints filed in the same district, each over a patent not now asserted against AMD.
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Innovation Technologies Partners LP (ITP)—disclosed as a limited partnership between Pretium Legal Opportunities Fund GP, LLC and Intertrust Technologies Corporation—has filed its first lawsuit. In a Central District of California complaint, ITP accuses Disney (Hulu) (2:25-cv-10969) of infringing eight patents moved from Intertrust to ITP this past March. The accused product is the Hulu streaming service.
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Polaris PowerLED Technologies, LLC has filed a Western District of Texas complaint against Apple (1:25-cv-01821). The plaintiff accuses Apple of infringing a single patent—generally related to ambient light correction on a “brightness control circuit”—through the provision of “ambient light sensors and automatic brightness control features” within various iPhone and MacBook-series products. The Apple suit falls into the oldest of Polaris PowerLED’s litigation campaigns, begun back in October 2017.
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Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC has launched its first litigation, suing Ford (2:25-cv-01116) in an Eastern District of Texas complaint over the provision of electric vehicles, as well as vehicles that are equipped with electric and/or hybrid-electric powertrain systems. At issue are features such as the inclusion of AC power outlets, high voltage batteries for powering vehicles, and DC Fast Charging capabilities. Bunker Hill is a Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC entity that had been collecting patents from Shanghai Langbo Communication Technology, but that is not the source of the eight patents now in suit against Ford.
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This fall, VDPP LLC has already filed separate complaints alleging infringement of a long-litigated video modification patent family by Alaska Air Group (7:25-cv-00530), ASSA ABLOY (Janam Technologies) (1:25-cv-05391), Delta Air Lines (7:25-cv-00529), Dukane (1:25-cv-13539), Dynamic Displays (3:25-cv-00805), FCA (1:25-cv-13535), Innovative Video Technology (1:25-cv-05404), JPMorganChase (JP Morgan Chase Bank) (2:25-cv-01118), Marriott International (2:25-cv-01046), Nordstrom (7:25-cv-00528), Olympus (1:25-cv-09243), Rivian Automotive (7:25-cv-00397), Roark Capital Group (Subway IP) (1:25-cv-24399), Schok (2:25-cv-01062), Speco Technologies (2:25-cv-06294), Starbucks (7:25-cv-00525), The TJX Companies (7:25-cv-00422), Touch Dynamic (4:25-cv-04177), and Victoria’s Secret (7:25-cv-00524). This campaign continues while a Federal Circuit appeal of sanctions against VDPP and its counsel Ramey LLP awaits resolution.
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Congruent Media Resourcing LLC (CMR) has begun litigating a former OpenPeak, Inc. patent with suits against Palo Alto Networks (2:25-cv-01121) in the Eastern District of Texas and PreEmptive Solutions (7:25-cv-00522) and Trend Micro (7:25-cv-00523) in the Western District of Texas. The plaintiff asserts a single patent generally related to “operating a secure application”, with the defendants accused of infringement through the use of Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) technology in their respective products: for Palo Alto Networks, the Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud Defender system; for PreEmptive Solutions, the Dotfuscator tool; and for Trend Micro, the Trend Micro Cloud One Application Security service.
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Adaptive Classification Technologies LLC (ACT) has filed its inaugural litigation with a Northern District of California complaint against Cloud Software Group (Arctera) (3:25-cv-09640) and a Western District of Texas complaint against KLDiscovery (KLDiscovery Ontrack) (1:25-cv-01802). The plaintiff asserts a single patent generally related to training a “classifier” in a “target set” of documents, using both a first and second “iterative” search strategy in the classification process, and terminating the process when the classifier “achieves a target level of recall with a certain probability upon termination”. Arctera is accused of infringement through the provision of the Arctera eDiscovery Platform and “Transparent Predictive Coding” feature; and KLDiscovery, over the KLDiscovery Nebula eDiscovery Platform and “Predictive Coding & Advanced Text Analytics” feature.
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On September 22, 20025, Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. (ID) assigned two patents to Value8 Co., Ltd., which has an active case in the Eastern District of Texas against Ford, over two different patents. Value8 has quickly asserted the pair more recently acquired in a second East Texas complaint against Ford (2:25-cv-01117), targeting the provision of vehicles—including Ford’s “Maverick, Explorer, Bronco, Super Duty, Ranger, Mustang, Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning, F-150, Expedition, and Escape vehicle models”—that support the Fordpass mobile app and incorporate the TEF810X Car Radar Transceiver (manufactured by NXP Semiconductors).
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E&S International Enterprises (d/b/a ESI Enterprises) (2:25-cv-10526) is the latest defendant to be added to the sole litigation campaign of Control Sync Systems, LLC (CSS). In the new Central District of California complaint, the plaintiff asserts a single patent generally related to controlling the “video and audio parameters of a display device and a play device”. The plaintiff targets the provision of TVs (i.e., the 4K UHD HDR Roku Smart LED TVs) that are compliant with the HDMI-CEC (High-Definition Multimedia Interface - Consumer Electronics Control) standard, which allegedly “enables connected devices to communicate with each other over HDMI cables”.
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In Case You Missed It
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On November 6, 2025, the Federal Circuit denied three petitions for mandamus review from Motorola Solutions, SAP, and Alphabet (Google) and Samsung challenging the USPTO’s recent and dramatic changes with respect to its process for deciding whether to institute trial in response to petitions for inter partes review (IPR). The appeals court turned away, in the mandamus setting, that those changes have violated petitioners’ due process rights and were procedurally invalid for being implemented without notice-and-comment rulemaking. Others with IPRs in the pipeline have scrambled to respond.
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City National Bank of Florida (CNBF) is pressing ahead with efforts to collect on an award of roughly $85K in fees, shifted against plaintiff mCom IP, LLC and its local counsel Victoria E. Brieant, while the pair’s appeal to the Federal Circuit proceeds. Ramey LLP is characterized as “national lead counsel” here, but its principal, William P. Ramey, III, never filed an application to proceed pro hac vice in the case. The suit has been marked by multiple complaints and insufficient pleading as well as a plaintiff failure to produce an agreement with NCR—inked in the same campaign over the same patent, even though NCR is identified as CNBF’s relevant vendor—and a failure to post a bond pending appeal. CNBF has made one attempt so far to secure a writ of execution against mCom IP’s only asset—the patent that it asserted.
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The RPX Intelligence team publishes 50 Weekly Newsletters per year. That means that two Mondays out of each year pass without an edition. One of those weeks occurs between Christmas and New Year's, and the other is the week of Thanksgiving. So, until the Monday after the coming holiday in the US...
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