The first round of litigation from Mimzi, LLC fizzled out when the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) canceled all claims from the sole patent that the inventor-controlled plaintiff had asserted in separate District of Delaware complaints filed against Foursquare Labs and TripAdvisor, in late 2018, and against Acer, ASUSTek, and HTC, in early 2019. More than two years later, Mimzi has returned to litigation, this time with three more recently issued patents from the same family, at issue in a new case against Samsung (2:23-cv-00238), filed in the Eastern District of Texas. The accused products are Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets using the SmartThings Find technology and/or the Bixby virtual assistant.  

The seven-plus-year litigation (1:17-cv-01751) leading up to the June trial between Personal Audio, LLC and Alphabet (Google)—over five claims from two audio player device patents—has been typical in many respects. It has seen a transfer (from the Eastern District of Texas to the District of Delaware); a stay (pending the conclusion of certain inter partes review (IPR) proceedings); a multimillion dollar ask (here, $33M in reasonable royalties); and the usual flurry of dispositive, Daubert, and in limine motions. The flurry in this case, though, surfaced an atypical question for Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly to answer: whether Personal Audio should be permitted to substitute a live expert at trial for one that it did not realize had died in January 2022 until just a few weeks ago. Per Judge Connolly, it should not.

Iarnach Technologies Limited, a plaintiff tied to Dublin-based monetization firm Atlantic IP Services, has filed its first litigation, suing AT&T (AT&T Mobility and several other subsidiaries) (2:23-cv-00231) in an Eastern District of Texas complaint. Five optical networking patents are asserted, with infringement allegations focused on the provision of “all components necessary”—including “hardware and software, optical line terminals (ONTs), and optical network units (ONUs)/optical network terminals (ONTs)”—in providing its fiber-optic networks and network services. Iarnach received the patents from ZTE earlier this year.

The litigation campaign of CellSpin Soft, Inc., launched in 2017 against 14 different defendants, has twice been stalled by trips to the Federal Circuit. The first time, the appellate court reversed an Alice invalidation, ginning activity back up—until last June when Northern District of California District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted summary judgment of noninfringement. An appeal of that decision is underway. Now, CellSpin Soft has sued one of those 14 defendants again, accusing Panasonic (4:17-cv-05941) of infringing six patents from the same family but not previously litigated. However, the new complaint, like CellSpin’s last one, has not been filed in the Northern District of California.

ART Research and Technology, L.L.C. (d/b/a ANZU) has filed suit against Meta Platforms (f/k/a Facebook) (Instagram) (3:23-cv-02562) over the provision of the Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, Facebook Clips and Facebook Gaming services. Features for allowing users to create “short-form video formats” complete with music, audio, augmented reality effects, and videos” are targeted with two patents described in the Northern District of California complaint as related to “annotating playable media files and systems for managing and sharing annotations between members of a social network”. The inventor-controlled plaintiff has filed its required certificate of interested parties, indicating that “there is no such interest to report”.

In 2020-2021, K.Mizra LLC launched six litigation campaigns. Five of those had gone dormant—until last week, when K.Mizra revived one of them by filing a Northern District of Illinois case accusing Konica Minolta (1:23-cv-03367) of infringing four former Sharp patents through the provision of multifunction printers and toner cartridges. Two other defendants in this campaign, HP and Ninestar (Lexmark), exited via relatively quick noticed settlements, while litigation against a third, Toshiba, persisted through claim construction, several months after which a settlement was also noticed. The new case against Konica Minolta comes as Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright has docketed, sua sponte, a “set of standard limine rulings to be applied mutually to both parties” in the first case that K.Mizra filed, against Cisco, in the other active campaign. Trial there is set for August 1.

Over the past month, Elite Gaming Tech, LLC has resuscitated the larger of its two litigation campaigns, suing Inventec (2:23-cv-00186), Pegatron (2:23-cv-00189), Ricoh (2:23-cv-00190), and Wistron (2:23-cv-00191) in April and Wiwynn (2:23-cv-00232) just this past week: Inventec, over the provision of computing products that include hard disk drives, solid-state hybrid drives, and dual-drive hybrid systems manufactured by Western Digital or Hitachi Global Storage Technologies; and for the remaining defendants, over computing products that include hard disk drives manufactured by one of the same two providers. This Alpha Alpha Intellectual Partners LLC campaign, begun in February 2020, had been dormant for roughly a year.

Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright may no longer be the nation’s top district court patent judge as of Q1 2023, but his back-and-forth with the Federal Circuit, which has repeatedly reversed him on the issue of convenience transfer motions, remains. Some had expected the Fifth Circuit’s October 2022 In re: Planned Parenthood ruling to tip that back-and-forth in Judge Albright’s direction, since that decision appeared to require more deference to district judges on venue. This February, though, the Federal Circuit held otherwise, doubling down on its prior approach in In re: Google. Judge Albright has now acknowledged the binding impact of that holding, though not without offering a passing criticism. In refusing to reverse a prior order granting transfer of a Motion Offense, LLC case against Alphabet (Google), Judge Albright remarked that the Federal Circuit’s determination in Google that NPEs lack an interest in getting cases to trial quickly “appears to be made out of whole cloth”.

Delaware Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly has dispensed with another motion to set aside a production order filed by a plaintiff tied to formerly prolific Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC. Lamplight Licensing LLC filed the latest failed motion, arguing, among other things, that the court lacks jurisdiction to issue the order because Lamplight dismissed the underlying cases and that the court must stick to the resolution of issues presented to it by a party. Per Judge Connolly, these arguments are “easily dismissed” because it would make “no sense that a party could deprive a court of its inherent powers simply by filing a notice of dismissal”, and “it cannot be that preservation of the integrity of the judicial process must always wait upon the diligence of litigants”.

A California magistrate judge has denied Netflix’s motion to compel discovery regarding third-party litigation funding (TPLF) provided to NPE plaintiff GoTV Streaming, LLC. Notably, by the time Netflix’s motion had been fully briefed, GoTV had disclosed the identity of its funder (which according to Magistrate Judge Shashi H. Kewalramani, the plaintiff “probably should have done sooner”) and also produced to the court, in camera, certain TPLF-related documents. In doing so, the NPE effectively rendered moot (per Judge Kewalramani) most of the arguments Netflix made in support of its discovery requests.