TLI Communications LLC v. Capital One Financial Corporation et al

The last time that Hanger Solutions, LLC—a Georgia NPE associated with monetization firm IPInvestments Group LLC (d/b/a IPinvestments Group)—assigned a set of the thousands of former Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) patents that it picked up late last year, the recipient, 21ST CENTURY GARAGE LLC (21st Century Garage), filed suit within weeks. Earlier this month, the transfer of two patents from Hanger Solutions to Kioba Processing, LLC, also associated with IPinvestments Group, was both executed and recorded, suggesting that another new campaign is imminent. The transferred patents generally relate to fraud prevention in “network based transactions” and name David P. Cook, the founder of Blockbuster Video, as their sole inventor.

RPX took note, among the USPTO assignment records made available during the first half of March, of the transfer of one set of patents to Fortress Investment Group LLC, after the NPE assignor’s default on a prior financing agreement. Fortress intervened in the campaign asserting some of those patents, bringing the litigation to a relatively rapid close. RPX also took notice of the transfer of patents from multiple assignors to another entity, Knapp Investment Company Limited, a British Virgin Islands entity that has never filed suit. The records made available in early March also contain transfers to frequent plaintiffs, including affiliates of patent monetization firms IP Valuation Partners LLC and Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, as well as Blackbird Tech LLC and Empire IP LLC.

This week, TLI Communications GmbH, a subsidiary of the publicly traded NPE Marathon Patent Group, Inc., launched new attacks on Yahoo and Pinterest, this time in French and Italian courts. TLI’s latest filings come four months after a court in Munich, Germany ruled that Yahoo, its European subsidiary Yahoo! EMEA Limited, and Pinterest have infringed European patent EP 0 814 611.