Longhorn HD LLC. v. Fortinet Inc. DC

In February 2020, Longhorn HD LLC voluntarily dismissed its case against Juniper Networks, one of two suits added to the NPE’s network security campaign in November 2019. The dismissal was without prejudice, and Longhorn HD has now refiled a complaint against Juniper Networks (2:19-cv-00099), asserting the same five patents, again in the Eastern District of Texas. A single petition for inter partes review (IPR), of just one of those five patents, has been filed over the life of this campaign, in which Check Point Software, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Sophos, and Trend Micro have come and gone as defendants while suits against Lanner Electronics, Mitel Networks, and NetScout Systems persist.

Longhorn HD LLC has launched a third litigation campaign, suing Samsung (2:20-cv-00350) in the Eastern District of Texas over a single patent, acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) and generally related to an “information backup system”. The NPE targets Samsung over the provision of smartphones that support Smart Switch, a technology for “seamlessly” upgrading from one model to another. Concurrently, Longhorn HD has added three new defendants to its existing network security campaign, hitting Mitel Networks (Mitel Software Technologies) (2:20-cv-00350), NetScout Systems (2:20-cv-00349), and Trend Micro (2:20-cv-00348), also in East Texas, over a variety of networking hardware and software products.

Longhorn HD LLC has added cases against Lanner Electronics (2:20-cv-00260), Palo Alto Networks (2:20-cv-00259), and Sophos (2:20-cv-00261) to the more recent of its two litigation campaigns. The NPE accuses each defendant of infringing the same three network security patents, acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), through the provision of “security gateways, routers, control system security appliance, clouds, and components and software that provide firewall, VPN, IPSec, DNS, IDS/IPS, and selective network address-based communication, mobile security, and threat protection”, targeting a wide variety of products.

Earlier this year, Longhorn HD LLC added Eastern District of Texas cases against Compal Electronics, Hon Hai, Inspur Group, and Micro-Star to its computer hardware campaign, this past week also suing NEC (2:20-cv-00148) and Panasonic (2:20-cv-00150) in the same district. The NPE alleges infringement, of overlapping subsets of patents acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), through the provision of various computing devices, targeting features related to hard drive monitoring, mechanical actuators, and damage protection as well as server mounting hardware.

“Elite Gaming Technology, LLC” (EGT) has launched a new litigation campaign over patents apparently acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), suing ASUSTek (2:20-cv-00059), Micro-Star International (MSI) (2:20-cv-00062), and Pegatron (ASRock) (2:20-cv-00060) in the Eastern District of Texas. The six patents asserted, of disparate origins, generally relate to computer hardware, with infringement allegations focused on long lists of computing devices (e.g., laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.), some based on their inclusion of Intel chipsets or hard disk drives supplied by Western Digital (directly, or by Hitachi Global Storage, which Western Digital acquired in 2012). EGT pleads that it is a Texas LLC at an address that suggests that its name is actually Elite Gaming Tech LLC, an NPE of familiar management.

Since its January 2018 formation, Longhorn HD LLC has filed two litigation campaigns, both over patents formerly held by Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), the plaintiff adding separate suits against Check Point Software Technologies (2:19-cv-00384) and Juniper Networks (2:19-cv-00385) to the second of those campaigns just this past week. The asserted patents generally relate to networking, including gateways, security, and virtual private networks, with infringement allegations targeting the provision of a wide variety of products, including “security gateways, routers, control system security appliance, clouds, and components and software that provide firewall, VPN, IPSec, DNS, IDS/IPS, and selective network address-based communication, mobile security, and threat protection”.

In March 2019, Virtual Watchdog Solutions, LLC, an entity created in Delaware in June 2018, assigned to Longhorn HD LLC 14 patents that it had received from several affiliates of Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) last July. The patents broadly relate to various aspects of networking (gateways, network security, mobile-VPNs, failure detection, etc.), the patents sourced prior to acquisition by IV from multiple different companies, including IP Dynamics, Ensim, OKI Electric, SteelCloud, Xerox, and individual inventors. Longhorn HD wasted little time asserting the first of these assets in litigation, suing Fortinet (2:19-cv-00124) in the Eastern District of Texas over five of them in mid-April. The new campaign is Longhorn HD’s second to date.