BSG Tech LLC v. Personalizationmall.com, Inc. DC

The sole litigation campaign of Hyper Search LLC, an affiliate of IPValuation Partners LLC (d/b/a IPVal), remains in Alice limbo as a validity challenge brought by defendant Facebook continues to hang over the asserted patents. While briefing for Facebook’s Alice motion ended in January, both parties have repeatedly apprised the District of Delaware of subsequent authority—including the Federal Circuit’s Aatrix Software and Berkheimer decisions, as well as subsequent opinions citing them. Undeterred, Hyper Search has expanded the campaign, filing new Delaware lawsuits accusing Foursquare Labs (1:18-cv-01274) and Snap (1:18-cv-01273) of infringing the same patents through the operation of their respective websites. The patents-in-suit belong to the same family and generally relate to a system for home page creation, graphical search engines, and a system for controlling information output based on user feedback, respectively.

BSG Tech LLC filed its largest round of litigation since beginning its campaign last May. The entity added 15 suits to its only campaign, suing retailers American Apparel, American Musical Supply, Alibris, Arlington Contact Lens, BabyAge.com, CTD, eBags, Iherb, Monoprice, New Moosejaw, Optics Planet, Personalizationmail.com, Power Equipment Direct, Wayfair, and Wine.com. The campaign involves three patents concerning storing and managing information in a database with search, filtering, and annotation capabilities (6,035,294; 6,195,652; 6,243,699). Defendants’ e-commerce websites are the accused products in the campaign.