Pragmatus AV [NPE] filed suit against Citrix Systems, alleging that defendant’s video conferencing solution infringes four patents related to video conferencing systems.  The patents-in-suit were originally held by videoconferencing systems provider, Avistar prior to assignment to Intellectual Ventures in December 2009 and subsequent assignment to Pragmatus AV in June 2010.  The current assignee, Pragmatus AV, and related entity, Pragmatus VOD,  have collectively filed 15 prior suits against defendants including Comcast, Cox, Facebook, LinkedIn, Photobucket, Time Warner, Yahoo, and YouTube to date.  The patents in the Avisatr portfolio have been the subject of two litigations while they were still owned by that entity.  In 2004, Avistar announced a cross license agreement under which Polycom agreed to pay Avistar $27.5 million for a fully paid up license and settling a 2002 patent suit filed by Avistar against Polycom. In 2005, Avistar filed suit against Tandberg.  Avistar issued a press release in February 2007,  reporting that the two companies had entered a license agreement and that Tandberg had agreed to make a one-time license payment to Avistar of $12.0 million. In 2008, Microsoft initiated reexaminations against 29 Avistar patents after Avistar approached the company regarding a license.  Fourteen of the reexamination petitions were rejected in short order. (Of the four in-suit-patents in the case filed against Citrix, the PTO rejected the petitions to reexamine three, and the fourth was later affirmed valid.)   Of the reexamined patents, however, the majority appear to have emerged with few or no changes to the claims. According to one Web commentator, Redmond Channel Partner (RPCU),  “The war, however, is already proving costly. Avistar announced last week that it’s letting go a whopping 25 percent of its workforce, primarily, it says, because of Microsoft’s action. Moss [Avistar's CEO] is blunt about his company’s prospects: ‘It’s going to cost us a lot of money. Truly, this was an action that hurt us.’ And it’s an action that, Avistar says, came out of the blue. One day, the company’s in talks about Microsoft licensing its technology, and the next, Microsoft is — in RCPU’s view, not in Avistar’s — trying to put it out of business and fleece its IP. “Some of the patents that have gone into reexam have nothing to do with Microsoft’s strategy or portfolio,” Moss said. (Well, not yet, anyway, RCPU says.) He adds that the reexamination of 29 patents would represent 5 percent of the total number of patents reexamined in the U.S. (600) all of last year. Added Rodde [Avistar IP director], ‘What we felt was that we had a basis for having a very in-depth licensing discussion whereas they would be licensing our technology. Those discussions [with Microsoft] turned into putting our patents into reexam. There was no intent to cut the discussions off. That’s why it was such a surprise to us. The [law] firm that does our patents — they believe this is an unprecedented action.” Now seems as good a time as any to drop in the obligatory Microsoft statement — since nobody in Redmond would actually talk to us about this story — on the Avistar patent move. It came via e-mail from Microsoft’s PR firm, attributed to Michael Marinello, director of public relations at Microsoft: