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A jury in the Eastern District of Texas has issued a verdict of infringement in litigation brought by a subsidiary of Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) against T-Mobile and Ericsson. The jury found that the defendants both infringed at least one of the patents-in-suit, T-Mobile through its LTE network and Ericsson through related LTE telecommunications equipment, awarding damages of $34M as to the former and $9M for the latter. That verdict comes after a series of recent setbacks for IV in the same litigation campaign, including the Federal Circuit’s affirmance of a T-Mobile Alice win last month and the partial grant in September of an Alice challenge brought by T-Mobile and SoftBank (Sprint). The European leg of that campaign has also run into trouble, with a noninfringement verdict reportedly issued last year in litigation against Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, and Vodafone.

Colorado plaintiff Cellect LLC appears to have put an ill-fated 2013 foray into patent litigation behind it, suing Samsung (1:19-cv-00438) over 11 patents generally related to the use of “stacked complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors”. Samsung is alleged to infringe through the provision of various Galaxy smartphones and tablets, the complaint focusing on various features of those devices’ cameras (e.g., image capture, image transfer, video calling). Cellect pleads that it provided notice “of its patents, including the Asserted Patents” to Samsung through an in-person meeting in February 2014, roughly at the halfway point of its prior, short-lived litigation against HTC.

A week following Apple’s early February declaratory judgment (DJ) complaint against Fundamental Innovation Systems International LLC (FISI) in the Northern District of California, the NPE has brought a separate infringement suit (2:19-cv-00048), asserting five of the 12 patents-in-suit in Apple’s DJ. FISI’s complaint, filed in the Eastern District of Texas on February 11, targets a similar list of products, including certain charging adapters, mobile devices, wireless earbuds, Bluetooth speakers, and wearables, but also adding certain Mac laptops (the “Macbook Pro 4th Gen, Macbook 8, Macbook 9, Macbook 10 and Macbook Air 8”). The patents asserted are a subset of hundreds acquired from BlackBerry in late 2015 and include patents previously litigated by FISI in cases against Huawei, LG Electronics (LGE), and Samsung (each of which subsequently took licenses to the FISI patents, according to the NPE), as well as ZTE (which was sued in early 2017 and remains active in litigation).

Innovative Foundry Technologies LLC (IFT) has filed its first US litigation over a portfolio of patents acquired from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) last June. New complaints have hit chip makers MediaTek (1:19-cv-00304), Qualcomm (1:19-cv-00323), and TSMC (1:19-cv-00308), targeting products manufactured using 5-65 nanometer processes, and BBK Communication (Guangdong OPPO Mobile, OnePlus Technology, Vivo Mobile) (1:19-cv-00305), Hisense (1:19-cv-00306), TCL (1:19-cv-00307), and VIZIO (8:19-cv-00301), targeting smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, televisions, and/or other devices that include such semiconductor products. Asserted in each of the new suits are up to five of the roughly 60 US patents transferred to IFT; the patents are generally related to various aspects of semiconductor/transistor fabrication, configuration, operation, and packaging.

Axcess International, Inc. has added two more District of Delaware suits to the litigation campaign that it began in December 2016 in the Eastern District of Texas, suing Robert Bosch (Bosch Security Systems) (1:19-cv-00226) and Honeywell (1:19-cv-00227). The plaintiff continues to assert a single patent that a Texas claim construction order characterizes as related to “integrating the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) with video data to provide video verification of an event, such as authorized access (or attempted unauthorized access) to a secure area”. Infringement allegations throughout the campaign have focused on remote security systems—for these latest defendants, Bosch’s Access Professional Edition-Video Verification and Honeywell’s WIN-PAK SE.

Implicit, LLC has filed a new round of Eastern District of Texas cases in its long-running litigation targeting network management products, hitting CA Technologies (2:19-cv-00038), Fortinet (2:19-cv-00039), and Imperva (2:19-cv-00040), all defendants new to the campaign, as well as Juniper Networks (2:19-cv-00037), Sandvine (2:19-cv-00041), and Sophos (2:19-cv-00042), all sued previously. In earlier court decisions, the patents have been divided into Implicit’s “Demultiplexing Patents”, generally related to “technology for computer message exchange processing and more specifically to technology for dynamically converting the form of the messages as the messages are being exchanged”, and its “Applet Patents”, broadly concerning “server technology for providing applets and applications to a client computer”. More than a dozen Implicit patents have been asserted since this campaign began, with eight patents—five from the first category and three from the second—at issue in these newest complaints. All six defendants are accused of infringing the three applet patents, with all but Sophos charged with infringement of the five demultiplexing patents.

Apple has brought a declaratory judgment (DJ) action against Fundamental Innovation Systems International LLC, an NPE with active campaigns in the US and Europe, and its corporate parent, Fundamental Innovation Systems International Holdings LLC (collectively, “FISI”). Apple’s DJ complaint (3:19-cv-00638), filed on February 5 in the Northern District of California, seeks a judgment of noninfringement for three categories of products that include certain adapters, mobile devices, and wearables. The 12 patents-in-suit originated with BlackBerry and include a group of USB charging patents that FISI has asserted in a campaign hitting Huawei, LG Electronics (LGE), Samsung, and ZTE. They were among the roughly 200 patent assets that BlackBerry assigned to FISI in a late 2015 transaction—a multi-million dollar deal, according to public records, that was embroiled in strife and gamesmanship.

Contemporary Display LLC, an affiliate of monetization firm IP Valuation Partners LLC (d/b/a IPVal), has added cases filed against Cox Communications (1:19-cv-00224) and Verizon (1:19-cv-00225) to the litigation campaign that it began last April. The NPE asserts two patents familiar to the campaign while debuting two in litigation for the first time, all of them acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) in an August 2017 transfer of five families of disparate origins. Cox is alleged to infringe through the provision of certain DVRs (while an apparently misfiled document on PACER has made the exact allegations against Verizon unclear); the patents generally relate to an adapter for a video monitor, an on-screen system for managing the inputs to a television, and a device switching between “sessions”.

Accelerated Memory Tech, LLC, an entity affiliated with Atlanta-based monetization firm IP Investments Group, LLC (d/b/a IPinvestments Group), has filed a third case in its sole campaign litigating a single patent generally related to improving server performance. The latest defendant is F5 Networks (2:19-cv-00183); the new case, filed in the Western District of Washington, joins a Northern District of Georgia suit against Barracuda Networks still active after an apparent settlement in a prior case brought against Citrix (the first suit filed in this campaign, in April 2018). F5 Networks is accused of infringement through the provision of its BIG-IP Platform, which allegedly “includes services such as WebAccelerator that perform functions such as handling HTTP requests, dynamic caching, and load balancing”. Meanwhile, last month, Accelerated Memory filed its opposition to a Barracuda Networks motion challenging the patent-in-suit as invalid under Alice.

Inventor-controlled Mimzi, LLC has expanded its sole litigation campaign, begun last November, by adding suits that target the voice response functionality provided by either Alphabet (Google) or Microsoft in mobile devices made and/or sold by Acer (1:19-cv-00272), ASUSTek (1:19-cv-00273), or HTC (1:19-cv-00274). Each new case identifies such devices for that defendant, providing infringement allegations with respect to the inclusion of voice response technology from Google (Voice Action, Search by Voice, Google Voice Search, Google Now, Google Assistant) or Microsoft (Cortana). For example, in the Acer suit, Mimzi calls out the Liquid Zest smartphone and Iconia One 10 tablet for their inclusion of the former; the Liquid Jade Primo smartphone and the Switch 7 Black Edition and Aspire E 15 laptops, of the latter. These latest defendants join Foursquare Labs and Trip Advisor in the campaign, both accused of infringement over apps made for “use on mobile devices that use the Apple, Android, Microsoft or other operating systems”.