Blue Spike’s Digital Watermarking Campaign, Twelve Years in the Making, Grows Larger
Despite an unfavorable Alice ruling late last year, Blue Spike LLC’s digital watermark campaign, initiated in April 2004 by Blue Spike Inc., continues to grow. On April 1, Blue Spike filed four separate suits against ASUS (6:16-cv-00273), BLU Products (6:16-cv-00271), Lenovo (6:16-cv-00272), and Verimatrix (2:16-cv-00329). The complaints against ASUS, BLU, and Lenovo assert two patents (5,745,569; 8,930,719) previously asserted in a number of Blue Spike’s over 120 cases filed to date. Blue Spike alleges that the companies infringe the ‘569 and ‘719 patents through their mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. The NPE’s complaint against Verimatrix accuses the company of infringing a group of ten patents (5,889,868; 7,770,017; 7,877,609; 7,913,087; 7,953,981; 8,121,343; 8,161,286; 8,175,330; 8,225,099; 8,307,213) through its digital watermarking technologies, including the defendant’s VideoMark and StreamMark products. (Blue Spike has filed only one other suit asserting the same ten patents, against The Nielsen Company (6:16-cv-00042) in February 2016; the case was dismissed with prejudice last week.)