Sapphire Dolphin LLC v. Panasonic Corporation et al. DC

RPX took note, among the USPTO assignment records made available during the first half of March, of the transfer of one set of patents to Fortress Investment Group LLC, after the NPE assignor’s default on a prior financing agreement. Fortress intervened in the campaign asserting some of those patents, bringing the litigation to a relatively rapid close. RPX also took notice of the transfer of patents from multiple assignors to another entity, Knapp Investment Company Limited, a British Virgin Islands entity that has never filed suit. The records made available in early March also contain transfers to frequent plaintiffs, including affiliates of patent monetization firms IP Valuation Partners LLC and Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, as well as Blackbird Tech LLC and Empire IP LLC.

One year after it began filing litigation, Sapphire Dolphin LLC added two new defendants to its campaign, Panasonic and Pioneer. Sapphire’s previous litigation involves two patents that relate to peer-to-peer communications over a network (6,094,676, 6,219,710). The suits against Panasonic and Pioneer assert the same patents and accuse defendants’ Bluetooth products of infringement. The patents-in-suit originated with operating company Hilgraeve Inc., which assigned the patents to FTE Exchange in October 2013. FTE Exchange has transferred patents to a number of NPEs, including Dynamic Hosting Company, TainoApp, Chinook Licensing, Coho Licensing, and SecureNova. Sapphire received the patents in an assignment in December 2013, several months before it began asserting them in litigation.