Uniloc Luxembourg S.A. et al v. Palisade Corporation

The filing spree of Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited continues unabated after handing over the reins of its monetization efforts to Fortress Investment Group LLC earlier this year. Last week alone, plaintiffs related to these entities jointly filed a new suit against Apple in the Western District of Texas, one against Cisco, two against Hike, and four against Alphabet (Google), all in the Eastern District of Texas. Since its acquisition of a large portfolio from Pendrell Corporation subsidiary Pendragon Wireless LLC this past January, Uniloc has been filing new lawsuits on nearly a weekly basis over those patents, on its own, before its transfer of over 600 US patent assets to Fortress in May, and together with Fortress since. That shift in patent ownership came as Fortress announced a new, $400M IP fund focused on patent assertion.

Yet more cases have been filed by Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited and Fortress Investment Group LLC, through controlled subsidiaries—six against Amazon (2:18-cv-00328, 2:18-cv-00329, 2:18-cv-00339, 2:18-cv-00340, 2:18-cv-00341, 2:18-cv-00342), and one against Microsoft (8:18-cv-01320). These filings follow a barrage of new cases filed the prior week against BlackBerry (four new cases), Huawei (one case), Samsung (one case), and ZTE (four cases), as well as against Amazon (four cases) and Microsoft (one case). Uniloc has now launched over 15 campaigns in 2018 alone, most of them asserting patents received this past January from publicly traded NPE Pendrell Corporation. In May 2018, Uniloc executed an assignment of nearly 600 US patents to Uniloc 2017 LLC, a Fortress subsidiary, according to a March 28, 2018 Asset Purchase Agreement, the terms of which have not been made public.

Uniloc filed nine separate suits against Autodesk, Avid Technology, Corel, GlobalSCAPE, Minitab, Palisade, PerkinElmer, Sony Creative Software, and The Tiffen Company alleging that the defendants’ computer software that implements piracy prevention technology infringes a patent related to an Internet-based piracy prevention software application.  Since September 2001, Uniloc has filed over 40 prior suits against over 80 defendants, including Alt-N, Wolfram Research, Activision Blizzard, Adobe, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Sony, and Texas Instruments.  Uniloc was assigned the patent by inventor Reuben Bahar in June 2011 and is the exclusive licensee.  12/21, Eastern District of Texas, 6:2012cv00966; 6:2012cv00967; 6:2012cv00968; 6:2012cv00969; 6:2012cv00970; 6:2012cv00971; 6:2012cv00972; 6:2012cv00973; 6:2012cv00974.