Since January 2012, Maxim Integrated Products [NCE] has filed ten suits against defendants including Capital One, Expedia, Groupon, and various other financial services providers and online retailers, alleging that the defendants’ apps infringe patents related to secure mobile transactions.  The patents involved in this campaign were owned by Dallas Semiconductor when it was acquired by Maxim for approximately $2.5 billion in 2001.  Maxim had been involved in lawsuits prior to this campaign, both as a plaintiff and defendant, but those earlier lawsuits all involved Maxim’s competitors in the semiconductor industry.  This recent campaign, by contrast, is a monetization effort targeting defendants that are unrelated to Maxim’s business.  Maxim has also been subject to five actions for declaratory judgment over the same patents during this period brought by Chipotle, Fidelity, Jack Henry & Associates, PNC, and Vanguard.  The complaints from these DJs are informative about Maxim’s litigation strategy.  Maxim typically writes a letter to the alleged infringer, accompanied by claim charts, stating that if it doesn’t hear from the recipient within a one month period, “Maxim will assume that [the recipient] does not want to obtain a license in a non-litigious manner and will act accordingly.”  Jack Henry goes as far as to allege that a Russian hacker hired by Maxim, “decompiled the source code of Jack Henry’s proprietary software, watched communication taking place on Jack Henry’s server, and manipulated source code during communications to determine what information was required for logging in.”  Jack Henry further alleges that the IP address responsible for the hacking attempts is from Russia, and that the demand letter Maxim sent to First United (Jack Henry’s customer) includes screenshots that indicate in the Russian language that the searches were performed in “Moscow Daylight Time.”