Sentius International LLC v. Corel Corporation

Inventor-controlled Sentius International, LLC has filed another suit in its spellcheck and grammar check campaign, accusing Apple (1:19-cv-01444) of infringing two patents already at issue in the litigation. The NPE accuses Apple of infringement through the provision of a wide variety of iOS devices, as well as certain versions of online applications (e.g., iCloud Keynote, iCloud Pages, iWork), as used with “Apple servers, a master dictionary database, [and] syndicated versions of that master dictionary database in the form of spell check dictionaries”. The complaint targets spellcheck and grammar check functionalities within those products. The new Delaware suit joins open cases in the same district filed last August against HTC and LG Electronics (LGE) and an open declaratory judgment action brought in the Northern District of California against Sentius by Zoho.

Sentius International, LLC has rebooted its litigation campaign, filing two new lawsuits, one each against HTC (1:18-cv-01216) and LG Electronics (LGE) (1:18-cv-01217) in the District of Delaware. The complaints assert only one of the two reissued patents most recently at issue in this campaign; in the NPE's last open case, filed in the Eastern District of Texas against BlackBerry, District Judge Rodney Gilstrap invalidated the sole asserted claim from the other patent for impermissible claim broadening through reissue proceedings. Both patents generally concern parsing and annotating document text, with the defendants accused of infringement through the provision of smartphones, along with certain preinstalled apps that allow text entry, and their systemwide spell-check features that highlight misspelled words and present suggested corrections.

After cases filed against BlackBerry and Corel, Sentius International, LLC has filed its third lawsuit of 2016 asserting two reissue patents (RE40,731; RE43,633) generally related to parsing and annotating document text. The new complaint (2:16-cv-00942) accuses IBM of infringement through provision of its Connections, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Symphony software products, which include what Sentius characterizes as a “‘red squiggly’ spell check feature”.