Earlier this month, publicly traded Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC) purchased more than 2,500 US patents, as well as foreign counterparts and applications, for $9M from Monterey Research, LLC. The subsidiary receiving those assets, MR Licensing LLC, has filed its first suit, in which it accuses DENSO and Renesas Electronics (2:25-cv-00441) of infringing eight of the patents through the provision of a long list of accused products. QPRC’s recent SEC filing describes the portfolio as related to “storage device security and semiconductor circuitry”, indicating that the financing for the deal includes “up to $7,500,000 for patent enforcement costs, including legal fees subject to budget limitation to be agreed upon”. Monterey Research sued the same two defendants over four of the patents appearing in MR Licensing’s new complaint last year; word on the docket of that case concerning this change of ownership has yet to appear, beyond entries of appearance by MR Licensing counsel Fabricant LLP.

Earlier this year, SIM IP—cofounded by CEO Erich Spangenberg and CFO David Kutcher—announced a “definitive agreement” to acquire Ultraleap’s haptics and extended reality (XR) IP portfolio, as part of a “new licensing partnership”. SIM IP has since issued two more press releases: a first announcing the acquisition of a patent portfolio from FusionLayer, described as “a pioneering network technology company originating from Finland”; and a second announcing a joint effort with “Strong Force Innovation Portfolios” to “further” develop and monetize the latter’s IP. Some of that IP has recently left Strong Force, together with a departing vice president.

In January 2025, an Eastern District of Texas jury sided with Samsung in litigation from Headwater Research LLC, finding that the defendant had not infringed the tried claims from a single patent. Now, a trial in a second case between the same parties has ended with a verdict for the plaintiff: On April 25, a different jury returned a verdict that Samsung had infringed claims from two additional patents and had not shown them to be invalid, awarding $278.8M in damages. The trial came shortly after the court denied a Samsung motion challenging Headwater’s standing to sue, after rejecting a related standing defense in the earlier-tried suit as well.

At least three presiding judges—in cases filed separately in the Northern District of California (N.D. Cal.) by Ramey LLP-repped Cooperative Entertainment, Inc., CyboEnergy, Inc., and Lime Green Lighting, LLC—have either denied Ramey LLP principal William P. Ramey III’s pro hac vice application or issued an order to show cause why such an application should not be denied. Trouble has arisen due (at least in part) to a false representation within those applications that Ramey has “been granted pro hac vice admission by the Court 0 times in the 12 months preceding this application”. Cooperative Entertainment has been ordered, by April 30, to submit a declaration from cocounsel Jennifer Ishimoto of Banie & Ishimoto LLP “indicating whether Ramey authored any of the filings in this action prior to his application to appear pro hac vice”.

Neither the Federal Circuit nor the US Supreme Court intervened—as KOJI IP LLC and its sanctioned Ramey LLP lawyers had repeatedly requested—to stop a hearing before Northern District of California Magistrate Judge Peter H. Kang this past Wednesday to consider at least some of Ramey’s “objections” to a pair of sanctions orders for the conduct of serial cases filed against Renesas Electronics. On Friday, Judge Kang posted a summary text order, promising a memorandum “in due course”. The relief that the sanctioned parties sought has been denied, the court ruling that all parties consented to proceed before a magistrate; that any reconsideration of the underlying orders is procedurally improper and problematic on the merits; that a stay of those orders pending appeal, characterized as “both premature and substantively weak”, is denied; and that the deadlines—including one on April 26, 2025 to self-report the sanctions imposed to state governing bodies as well as to other federal courts and to pay monetary fines tied to unpaid pro hac vice application fees—remain “as set”.

One last case filed by Lauri Valjakka, in the Northern District of California, remains open, with briefing having completed on defendant Netflix’s motion asking for an order to show cause why former plaintiff counsel Ramey LLP (and its principal William P. Ramey III) should not be sanctioned. Netflix contends that Ramey LLP violated the case’s protective order by sharing sensitive Netflix-produced information with AiPi, LLC, an entity formerly operating in the background of multiple patent litigation campaigns, sometimes as funder, sometimes as “de facto lead counsel”. AiPi filed a motion to quash a related subpoena in the Eastern District of Virginia, where earlier this year that court ordered “full and complete discovery”, including forensic discovery, from AiPi. An assertion of privilege preventing the production of certain materials was brushed away this past week; per the court, “it is clear that AiPi was not representing Valjakka as his attorney throughout most of their relationship” such that “the parties’ designated third-party neutral forensic expert” PricewaterhouseCoopers has been ordered to “produce all documents currently sequestered based on Mr. Valjakka’s improper claim of privilege”.  

When a plaintiff needs to beat a fast retreat, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure (FRCP) 41(a)(1)(A)(i) provides an escape hatch, allowing a plaintiff (subject to other minor limitations) to “dismiss an action without a court order by filing a notice of dismissal before the opposing party serves either an answer or a motion for summary judgment”. Such a dismissal is effective upon filing of the notice. However, using FRCP 41 in this way is not without risks. For example, on April 4, 2025, VPN Technology Holdings, LLC voluntarily dismissed an affirmative Eastern District of Texas case against IBM (Red Hat), after counsel for Red Hat identified certain noninfringement positions, but VPN Technology did so without prejudice and with a statement that it did so “while we investigate some of the points raised in your letter”. On April 10, Red Hat filed a declaratory judgment action against VPN Technology in a different court, the Eastern District of Virginia, pleading a “threat of renewed litigation”.

A recent review of assignments of US patent assets made public by the USPTO reveals that the divestiture from Shanghai Langbo Communication Technology previously reported is bigger than at first blush. Such USPTO records also contain transfers of a signal transmission portfolio to a company with plans “to license its IP, look for potential partnerships, and be open to attractive acquisition possibilities”; of an image processing portfolio to a Texas entity held indirectly by an IP figure touting experience through “every stage of the patent process from initial invention to patent prosecution to exercising patent rights through licensing, sale and litigation”; and of a wireless communications portfolio to a licensing executive leaving one firm to set up his own.

Hamilcar Barca IP LLC is a Longhorn IP LLC entity holding a portfolio of former MediaTek patents. It has now filed its first affirmative lawsuit, accusing NVIDIA (1:25-cv-00620) in a new Western District of Texas complaint of infringing two of them, one described as directed to “processing noise interference according to an error feedback mechanism of a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (‘SATA’)”; the other, to computing systems operating in multiple security environments. The respective accused products are “any device or system implementing SATAv3 or later, including but not limited to the NVIDIA SN2000 switch and NVIDIA DGX Systems” and “the ARMv8-A-compliant data or central processing units, and other systems and devices made, imported, or sold by NVIDIA supporting the ARMv8-A or later architecture”.

Calibrate Networks LLC has launched its first litigation by suing BlackBerry (2:25-cv-00435) and IBM (2:25-cv-00434) in the Eastern District of Texas as well as Airbnb (7:25-cv-00197), Box (7:25-cv-00196), Shopify (7:25-cv-00192), and SolarWinds (7:25-cv-00191) in the Western District of Texas. The New Mexico plaintiff targets IBM and SolarWinds over the quality of service (QoS) features of their respective SevOne Network Performance Monitoring Tool and NetFlow Traffic Analyzer service; the other defendants, over their use of Kubernetes for managing application containers for various products.