The launch of a new semiconductor campaign looks imminent, with USPTO records reflecting the recent assignment of former AMD/ATI Technologies patents to an NPE. Similar movement of an AMD/ATI portfolio last year—from the same assignee, Fullbrite Capital Partners, LLC, to a Delaware entity—was a precursor to NPE Vantage Micro LLC’s campaign, which to date has hit nine defendants over the provision of a wide range of controllers, integrated circuits, and processors.
On October 22, Fullbrite Capital assigned seven US patents to Ocean Semiconductor LLC, an NPE formed in Delaware this past July. The transacted assets generally concern semiconductor fabrication technology, automated manufacturing environments, and integrated circuit packaging; they can be viewed on RPX Insight here.
In the assignment agreement between Fullbrite and Ocean Semiconductor, Erik S. Stamell signed as the former entity’s managing member. Stamell is currently identified as a principal for Equitable Advisors, a Michigan concern with a website that characterizes Stamell, among other things, as “president and CEO of Equitable IP Corp., an intellectual property monetization company, which owns or is a partner in more than 700 patents in the U.S., Europe and Asia”. (While Equitable IP Corporation has identified Stamell as an officer in the past, Kevin C. Brady is now identified as filling Stamell’s prior positions.)
The relationship between Fullbrite and Ocean Semiconductor should become clearer if the latter begins filing litigation. Fullbrite Capital, which itself has not filed any patent litigation to date, has been identified in court filings as the corporate parent of Vantage Micro, a Delaware NPE that has been litigating a group of former AMD/ATI patents since late last year. Vantage Micro received its patents-in-campaign from Fullbrite Capital in a 2019 assignment.
Public records indicate that Fullbrite’s general counsel, Ed Gomez, controls Daedalus Group LLC, which earlier this year received a large assignment of assets from IBM (see here for details). Subsets of those assets are now being litigated by Daedalus Blue LLC (also controlled by Gomez), which last week expanded one of its two campaigns asserting former IBM patents with a suit against MicroStrategy (2:20-cv-00551).
Daedalus Blue (which has also sued Oracle and SZ DJI Technology this year) has targeted MicroStrategy over its MicroStrategy Platform, an enterprise analytics product. The asserted patents generally relate to “generating aggregate data values from data stored in a data source” (8,341,172) and managing access roles with different permission levels in a computer system (9,032,076). A closer look at Daedalus Blue’s campaigns is available here, with recent reporting on its divestiture to yet another litigating NPE, K.Mizra LLC, here.
