Document Security Systems, Inc. v. Cree, Inc.

RPX continues to observe NPEs dropping suits in one venue, only to refile them in another, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision. Publicly traded NPE Document Security Systems, Inc. (DSS) did just that on June 7-8, voluntarily dismissing its April 2017 cases filed against Cree, Everlight, and Seoul Semiconductor in the Eastern District of Texas, and re-filing against the companies in the Central District of California. DSS’s new complaints assert various combinations of a group of five patents originating with either Agilent or Avago (now Broadcom, after their merger), and allege infringement through various products containing LEDs.

The sole litigation campaign waged by South Korea’s SungKyunKwan University Research and Business Foundation (SKK) ground to a halt on May 3, when District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the asserted claim from the 3D sensor patent (7,957,639) at issue is invalid under Alice. In an order granting a motion to dismiss filed by LMI Technologies (3:16-cv-06966), Judge Chhabria held that claim 1 from the ‘639 patent fails the first step of Alice, as it is purportedly directed to a solution for “optimizing exposure on a structured-light 3D camera” but contains no information on an actual method for doing so beyond a description of prior art. The dismissal marks the putative end of the second campaign launched by a Korean university in the past few months, with another having been launched by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in January, and comes after ID Ventures, the venture capital arm of South Korea’s sovereign patent fund, Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. (ID), announced plans to expand beyond technology IP investment.

Document Security Systems, Inc. (DSS) has launched a new litigation campaign with suits against Cree (2:17-cv-00309), Everlight (2:17-cv-00310), and Seoul Semiconductor (2:17-cv-00308). The defendants are accused of infringing a group of semiconductor patents originating with Agilent or Avago (now Broadcom, after their merger) through provision of various products containing LEDs, including light bulbs, displays, and fixtures. DSS’s latest campaign, which was foreshadowed by an SEC filing late last year, follows a history of troubled litigation.