Acacia Files New Round of Suits in One of Its Long-Running Mobile Communications Campaigns

Cellular Communications Equipment LLC (CCE), a subsidiary of publicly traded NPE Acacia Research Corporation, has filed its first round of litigation in roughly two years, hitting BBK Electronics (One Plus Technology) (2:20-cv-00079), HMD Global (2:20-cv-00078), and TCL (2:20-cv-00080) in separate suits filed in the Eastern District of Texas. While over its seven-year life, this campaign has seen more than 20 patents asserted, against nearly two dozen defendants, the current complaints assert a single patent, generally related to a mobile operating system with a software process that checks whether an application has permissions to perform a function. The defendants are alleged to infringe that patent through the provision of smartphones running Google’s Android 4.2 or higher, targeting the devices’ inclusion of the native Android Messaging app.