Liberty Patents, LLC v. Lenovo Group Limited et al DC

Last month, Liberty Patents LLC launched a second litigation campaign with suits against Analog Devices, Lattice Semiconductor, and Texas Instruments (TI) over clock generators. The plaintiff has followed those January complaints with another suit against TI (2:21-cv-00050), this one back in its first litigation campaign. The plaintiff asserts four power management patents, three of which are new to litigation, with infringement allegations targeting the provision of the TDA2X System-on-Chip devices. At issue is the incorporation of certain ARM-branded processors and support of the Adaptive Body Bias (ABB) technique. To date, Liberty Patents has asserted eight patents—each received in a portfolio of over 130 assets from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) in December 2019—against a total of over 20 defendants across its two litigation campaigns: the first, launched in September 2020; and the second, in January 2021.

Liberty Patents LLC, an NPE with ties to several other litigating plaintiffs, has added new defendants to an ongoing litigation campaign, begun in September 2020, and kicked off a second campaign, both over patents from a portfolio of over 130 assets received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). In its new campaign, the plaintiff asserts two patents, generally related to “minimizing a difference in delay between a plurality of output clock signals”, against Analog Devices (6:21-cv-00060), Lattice Semiconductor (6:21-cv-00061), and TI (6:21-cv-00062), each sued in the Western District of Texas. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision of clock generators that feature “zero delay buffer (ZDB) technology”. In its older campaign, Liberty Patents has filed a single complaint against Microchip, NXP Semiconductors, Renesas, and STMicro (6:21-cv-00078), targeting the provision of various semiconductor products, including microcontrollers, that are certified by Platform Security Architecture. The defendants are accused of infringing a single patent generally related to automatically updating the system software of an “embedded system”.

Liberty Patents LLC continues to roll out new litigation over three patents from the over 130 assets acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) at the very end of 2019. This past week’s complaints hit Broadcom, Fujitsu, Hon Hai Precision Industry (Sharp), MediaTek, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics in a single complaint (6:20-cv-00970), as well as Dell on its own (6:20-cv-00944), with both pleadings filed in the Western District of Texas. The -970 complaint targets each defendant over the provision of devices “that include processors with the capability to ignore reading the tag field when a sequential instruction is to be loaded”, suing them all jointly because each accused product uses “the processors and related processes based on common ARM architectures”. Dell is accused of infringing the other two patents in the campaign through the provision of computing devices that support PowerShare and ChromeOS auto-update features.

Liberty Patents LLC has filed suit against Lenovo and Compal Electronics, as well as what started as a joint venture between them, LC Future Center (2:20-cv-00314), in an Eastern District of Texas complaint targeting a wide variety of computing devices. The case follows early September 2020 suits in the same district against Acer, ASUSTek, HP, Micro-Star International, and Panasonic. The NPE focuses its infringement allegations on devices that incorporate certain ARM-branded processors, support certain charging features, are Platform Security Architecture (PSA) certified, and/or use Google’s ChromeOS firmware.

Liberty Patents LLC, an NPE with ties to several other litigating plaintiffs, has sued Acer (2:20-cv-00287), ASUSTek (2:20-cv-00288), HP (2:20-cv-00289), Micro-Star International (2:20-cv-00290), and Panasonic (2:20-cv-00291) over the provision of a wide variety of computing devices, including those that incorporate certain ARM-branded processors, support certain charging features, are Platform Security Architecture (PSA) certified, and/or use Google’s ChromeOS firmware. Three patents are asserted across the new complaints, Liberty Patents having acquired them as part of a 100-plus asset pickup from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) in December 2019.