After an early September reboot of two earlier litigation campaigns and the start of a third, Callstat Solutions LLC has began a fourth, suing Sync.com (6:21-cv-00918) and Zoom Video Communications (1:21-cv-01314) over a single patent generally related to “dynamically indicating a status of a communication system” through a “graphical user interface”. The asset is one of thousands assigned by Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) to Hanger Solutions, LLC in December 2019, as are the patents-in-suit in Callstat’s other three campaigns, two of which Callstat has just expanded as well: one to add a case against ZTE (6:21-cv-00919) and the second to sue Check Point Software (3:21-cv-02134) and McAfee (2:21-cv-00352).

Last month, 5G IP Holdings LLC—an NPE associated with monetization firm IPValuation Partners LLC (d/b/a IPVal)—filed its first suit to date, hitting Samsung over wireless communications patents, received from FG Innovation Company Ltd. (f/k/a FG IP Innovation Company Ltd.) (FGI) and allegedly declared essential to the 5G standard. Now, USPTO records suggest that at least one more NPE may be in line to litigate former FGI patents—this time with Longhorn IP LLC at the helm.

The past few weeks have brought two significant new rulings on standard essential patent (SEP) litigation in two of the world’s most notable patent venues. Most recently, China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) ruled in Oppo v. Sharp that Chinese courts may set the terms of global fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licenses—the second time that a national court has asserted such jurisdiction since the UK’s Unwired Planet v. Huawei decision last year. One week prior, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the result of the first jury verdict to address a SEP owner’s FRAND compliance, upholding a judgment for Ericsson.

Named inventor Lauri Valjakka has filed suit against Akamai (6:21-cv-00942), Amazon (6:21-cv-00945), Cisco (6:21-cv-00944), and Netflix (6:21-cv-00947) over the respective provision of their Edge, CloudFront, Kinetic, and Open Connect distributed computing platforms. A single patent, broadly directed to transferring data over a network, is asserted across the set of Western District of Texas complaints.

On the same day that Xerox’s attempt to have their dispute adjudicated in the Western District of New York resulted in a transfer, Monument Peak Ventures, LLC (MPV) filed an affirmative case (2:21-cv-00345) against the company in the Eastern District of Texas. That suit concerns six former Eastman Kodak patents, asserted against various printers and scanners and related software over features primarily related to print management, document image processing, layout templates, and adjustable touchscreen displays. Xerox immediately dismissed the transferred case, which concerned a different subset of MPV’s portfolio, all of this activity occurring as the Federal Circuit considers MPV’s appeal from a final judgment from a Central District of California case, filed in November 2019 against Toshiba, invalidating another subset of those patents under Alice.

The Federal Circuit has overturned part of a damages award in a long-running automotive dispute between Omega Patents LLC and CalAmp. On September 14, the appellate court held in a precedential opinion that the royalty of $5 per infringing device imposed by a Florida judge improperly lacked apportionment—partly because the plaintiff’s damages case failed to account for the “inventive aspects” of the patent at issue.

Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC) appears to have combined portfolio acquisitions from TaaSera, a shuttered network security firm, and Daedalus Blue LLC, an NPE in receipt of a large assignment of assets from IBM, under a network security umbrella. The publicly traded NPE’s public website lists 29 US patents and two foreign patents as held by Taasera Licensing LLC, a subsidiary that currently available USPTO records have yet to reflect owns patents.

Arigna Technology Limited, one of several plaintiffs associated with Dublin-based patent monetization firm Atlantic IP Services Limited, has launched another litigation campaign in 2021, after three in a row targeting automotive defendants. The NPE has sued Apple and Samsung (6:21-cv-00943) together in a single Western District of Texas complaint targeting the alleged inclusion of Qualcomm’s HG11-PG660-200 RF die semiconductor device, as well as certain front-end modules (FEMs) and transceivers, within certain smartphones and tablets of the defendants. The plaintiff asserts two patents, one originating with Microchip Technology and the other from Mitsubishi Electric, characterized in the new complaint as generally related to “power semiconductor devices using high-frequency RF signals for use in mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers”.

Under new ownership, SoundStreak Texas LLC did not waste time expanding its sole litigation campaign after reviving it with a late-August case against Yamaha. This past week, the NPE, now a subsidiary of publicly traded Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC), added suits against Nikon (2:21-cv-00362), Olympus (2:21-cv-00361), Panasonic (2:21-cv-00360), and Sony (2:21-cv-00359). A single patent generally related to managing a recording session over a network is asserted against each defendant, targeting their respective provision of remote audio/video recording products.

This past June, Invincible IP LLC, an apparent IP Edge LLC plaintiff, launched a campaign over the alleged infringement of up to five former Empire Technology Development LLC patents, of disparate origins, through the provision of infrastructure software products and solutions. The deadlines to respond to those five District of Delaware complaints have all been extended to October 1. As part of its end-of-August filing spree, the Texas monetization firm has now added four more Delaware suits to the mix, one filed against each of Dell (Boomi) (1:21-cv-01224), HashiCorp (1:21-cv-01227), LifeRay Cloud (1:21-cv-01226), and Salesforce (MuleSoft) (1:21-cv-01228).