News Displaying search results 1 - 10 of 503 Weekly Newsletter

In January, RPX flagged a series of internal patent assignments among subsidiaries of Concert Technology Corporation, questioning whether they signaled a possible reboot by the NPE. A group of complaints filed this past week against Bumble, LG Electronics, Lyft, and Samsung by Ikorongo Technology, LLC and Ikorongo Texas, LLC indicate that Concert is back in the business of patent monetization.

Sunset Licensing LLC has sued Azuga (5:20-cv-02174), CalAmp (4:20-cv-00267), Marelli Holding (1:20-cv-00448), Sierra Wireless (1:20-cv-00449), Skypatrol (1:20-cv-00450), Smartrak (3:20-cv-02176), and Torre Industries (MiX Telematics) (4:20-cv-01154) in various districts. Each defendant is accused of infringing a single patent, generally related to monitoring the speed of a vehicle, through the provision of devices capable of tracking vehicle speed. With recent years past as prologue, and particularly given other recent IP Edge LLC activity, this new campaign appears to be the first of many—with USPTO assignment records suggesting that some may see patents asserted from the same source.

Pearl IP Licensing LLC, an entity apparently associated with Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, has sued Deutshe Telekom (T-Mobile) (6:20-cv-00260) over a single patent generally related to a circuit that can recover from certain “stress conditions”. T-Mobile is accused of infringement through the provision of certain “apparatus[es]”—identifying as an exemplary accused product the Motorola Z2 Force smartphone, targeted over its inclusion of Qualcomm processors with certain power and voltage management features. Pearl IP asserts current ownership of the patent, although currently available USPTO records do not yet reflect an assignment away from the NPE that acquired the patent from Cypress Semiconductor in August 2016.

Valyrian IP LLC has filed a second round of suits in its campaign over a former Siemens patent generally related to a cordless phone system where calls are forwarded from a base station to handsets based on priority. The new defendants are Sangoma (1:20-cv-00447), sued in the District of Delaware; RingCentral (1:20-cv-00868), in the District of Colorado; and AT&T (4:20-cv-00263), SpectrumVoIP (4:20-cv-00264), and Verizon (4:20-cv-00266), all sued in the Eastern District of Texas. The prior cases in the campaign—filed in July 2019 against Avaya, Grandstream Networks, ICON Voice Networks, and Plantronics (Polycom)—each ended after at most six months of uneventful litigation.

GlobalFoundries (6:20-cv-00243) has become the third defendant in the active litigation campaign of STC.UNM, the intellectual property enforcement arm of the Board of Regents of the University of New Mexico, over a homegrown semiconductor fabrication patent. The plaintiff accuses GlobalFoundries of infringement through the provision of semiconductor devices manufactured at “several process nodes” (i.e., minimum physical feature size or line width), including the 12 nm and 14 nm process nodes, with the body of the new complaint highlighting AMD Ryzen 2000-series chips as allegedly made at the identified nodes. On March 13, 2020, District Judge Alan D. Albright held a claim construction hearing in the two earlier suits in the campaign, one each filed against Samsung and TSMC.

Lightside Technologies, LLC continues to add defendants to the litigation campaign that it began back in November 2016, suing Westinghouse Electronics (5:20-cv-00378) in the Central District of California and HTC (3:20-cv-00725) in the Northern District of Texas. Each complaint asserts different members of the same patent family, generally related to upscaling video content and providing video frame-rate conversion—with two family members asserted against HTC over the provision of HTC One series smartphones with slow-motion video capture and one family member against Westinghouse, targeting the provision of HDTVs and UHDTVs with MEMC (motion estimation/motion compensation) features.

Following a barrage of lawsuits against Huawei filed in the Western District of Texas earlier in March (see here), WSOU Investments, LLC has now trained its fire on ZTE, filing ten suits (6:20-cv-00211, 6:20-cv-00216, 6:20-cv-00224, 6:20-cv-00228, 6:20-cv-00229, 6:20-cv-00238, 6:20-cv-00240, 6:20-cv-00242, 6:20-cv-00254, 6:20-cv-00255), also in West Texas. WSOU asserts in each complaint a single patent from a portfolio of assets received from Nokia (including from Alcatel-Lucent) throughout 2017. Together, the ten new suits target a range of networking devices provided by ZTE—with only one of them asserting a patent already in suit against Huawei.

Earlier this month, RPX pointed the readers of this weekly newsletter to public records identifying Marconi as the source of at least some of the patents recently acquired by Acacia Research Corporation. The transacted portfolio, assigned in February to a newly created Acacia subsidiary, includes assets originating with Samsung as well as patents developed by Fusion-IO (which in 2014 was acquired by SanDisk for $1.1B).

Proven Networks, LLC has added a Northern District of California suit against Extreme Networks (3:20-cv-02067) and a Western District of Texas suit against Amazon (6:20-cv-00266) to its sole litigation campaign, begun in March with separate cases against Cisco, filed in the Eastern District of Texas, and Dell (EMC), in the Western District of Texas. Proven accuses Amazon of infringing two former Nokia patents, with one asserted previously against Cisco and Dell and the other asserted previously against only Dell, while Extreme Networks is accused of infringing three former Nokia patents, one asserted against both Cisco and Dell, another asserted against Amazon and Dell, and a third appearing in litigation for the first time. Amazon is accused of infringement through the provision of the Amazon ElastiCache in-memory data store and cache, AWS Transit Gateway, and CloudFront content delivery networks (CDN) service, while Extreme Networks is accused over the Extreme XOS network operating system and various network devices that run it, including switches and edge devices; and Extreme Application Analytics, a platform that offers analytics for network application usage.

Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), through subsidiary Intellectual Ventures II LLC (IV II), has sued Dell (VMware) (6:20-cv-00220) over the provision of various products related to virtualization and data center network traffic monitoring and optimization. Five patents of disparate origins are asserted in the new Western District of Texas complaint, IV having moved three of them into the plaintiff’s possession back in 2018, assigning the other two to IV II earlier in March—along with five others of similar subject matter but not yet asserted in litigation. Various VMware products are accused of infringing the five patents.