Shipping and Transit, LLC v. Brown-Forman Corporation

In a further expansion of its massive litigation campaign, Electronic Communication Technologies LLC (f/k/a Eclipse IP, LLC) (ECT) has made another eleven filings against a swath of online retailers. The NPE accuses Acecom (2:16-cv-01363), Action Envelope & Printing (2:16-cv-01364), Artbeads.com (2:16-cv-01365), Birthday Direct (2:16-cv-01366), Bulbs.com (2:16-cv-01367), CandyWarehouse.com (2:16-cv-01368), IHF Holdings (Icon Health & Fitness) (2:16-cv-01370), Gump’s Holdings (2:16-cv-01369), Parts Express (2:16-cv-01371), Super Warehouse (2:16-cv-01372), and Tea Living (d/b/a Tea Collection) (2:16-cv-01373) of infringing three patents (7,319,414; 7,876,239; 9,373,261) generally related to tracking shipments online and notifying recipients of their progress. As in a previous round of complaints filed by ECT in late September, these latest defendants are alleged to infringe through the order and shipping confirmation features offered by their respective websites. On December 8, just two days after each complaint was filed, ECT dropped the ‘414 and ‘239 patents from all eleven cases by amended complaint. ECT did the same on December 2 for its case against ShoppersChoice.com (9:16-cv-81677), one of the suits brought in the NPE’s September wave of filings.

Shipping & Transit, LLC’s late August filings, against Comcast, DISH, and ten others, followed 46 new cases filed in June-July and bring the NPE’s defendant count to 166. Shipping & Transit’s litigation campaign was launched in April 2015 and is a revival of an earlier campaign, waged by ArrivalStar SA and Melvino Technologies Limited, that hit over 500 companies between 2002 and 2015. With these latest rounds of suits, Shipping & Transit holds strong as the second most prolific NPE so far in 2016, both by number of new cases filed and number of defendants sued.

Shipping and Transit, LLC sued Acer and Brown-Forman, as part of a recently launched campaign. The entity filed three suits on April 27, 2015, and within two weeks it had more than a dozen suits. Each case asserts four patents concerning notification systems for tracking a vehicle (6,904,359, 6,975,998, 7,030,781, 7,400,970). Shipping notification services that defendants provide to customers are at issue in the suits.