Valyrian IP LLC v. Avaya Inc.

Valyrian IP LLC has filed a second round of suits in its campaign over a former Siemens patent generally related to a cordless phone system where calls are forwarded from a base station to handsets based on priority. The new defendants are Sangoma (1:20-cv-00447), sued in the District of Delaware; RingCentral (1:20-cv-00868), in the District of Colorado; and AT&T (4:20-cv-00263), SpectrumVoIP (4:20-cv-00264), and Verizon (4:20-cv-00266), all sued in the Eastern District of Texas. The prior cases in the campaign—filed in July 2019 against Avaya, Grandstream Networks, ICON Voice Networks, and Plantronics (Polycom)—each ended after at most six months of uneventful litigation.

Valyrian IP LLC has become the seventh plaintiff in apparent association with IP Edge LLC to file suit over patents that the monetization firm received from Siemens in October 2018. The patent that Valyrian has now asserted against Avaya (1:19-cv-01436), Grandstream Networks (1:19-cv-01437), ICON Voice Networks (3:19-cv-01829), and Plantronics (Polycom) (1:19-cv-01438) generally relates to a cordless phone system where calls are forwarded from a base station to handsets based on one of three priority levels assigned to a phone number as stored with caller ID info in a directory: “lowest priority” (or “DO NOT DISTURB”), “intermediate priority”, and “highest priority”. The NPE targets the defendants over the provision of cordless phone systems with “Do Not Disturb” features that allow the user to pick certain phone numbers from a directory as “priority” numbers, where calls still go through when Do Not Disturb is enabled.