Multimodal Media LLC, a subsidiary of publicly traded Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC), has filed its first litigation, suing BBK Electronics (OPPO) (2:21-cv-00436) and ZTE (2:21-cv-00437) over the provision of smartphones and tablets that support certain calling and messaging capabilities. The four asserted patents were developed by Kirusa—a telecommunications company founded in 2001 by “a handful of technocrats from AT&T Bell Labs”—and were acquired as part of a nine-patent portfolio for which QPRC reports that it paid $550K. In October, a different QPRC subsidiary hit both OPPO and ZTE, alleging infringement of patents from a separate portfolio.

Delaware District Judge Leonard Stark has held another “Section 101 Day”, an experimental practice unique to his district under which a judge hears multiple Alice motions from unrelated cases on a single day and issues oral rulings from the bench, one after another. This time around, Judge Stark rejected three patent eligibility challenges, including two against NPE patents and another against a patent asserted by an operating company. The consolidated ruling comes the same week that Judge Stark faced questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee for his nomination by President Joe Biden to fill a soon-to-be-open seat on the Federal Circuit.

Courts tend to give patent litigants significant flexibility in crafting a damages theory, with the traditional Georgia-Pacific factors offering a variety of entry points for determining a reasonable royalty. However, as one plaintiff recently learned the hard way, a damages theory must have a sufficient connection to the relevant facts to approximate the results of a hypothetical negotiation between the parties. As recounted by RPX last week, Delaware District Judge Richard G. Andrews threw out the original damages case offered by plaintiff NexStep just before a scheduled trial earlier in the fall, ruling that a proposed 50-50 split of the cost savings with defendant Comcast was improperly based on a “rule of thumb” without sufficient linkage to the facts of the case.

Last July, IP Edge LLC acquired over 700 US assets, and many more foreign assets, from Technicolor SA, a provider of services and products for the communication, media, and entertainment industries. It took a year, into this past summer, for the Texas monetization firm to begin litigating assets from that acquisition; now, however, several months later, IP Edge has now initiated 15 litigation campaigns from the portfolio, still only asserting under 25 patents from among those received, against nearly 60 defendants to date.

Uniloc 2017 LLC was a notably prolific litigant around three years ago, but the NPE has since ceased the active filing of litigation as it fights appellate battles on multiple fronts. Late last month, one of those appeals ended adversely for the Fortress Investment Group LLC subsidiary, when the Federal Circuit affirmed a consolidated Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision for Apple, Facebook and WhatsApp, Huawei, and LG Electronics (LGE) that invalidated claims from a Uniloc patent and ordered the PTAB to reconsider two additional claims previously upheld. Meanwhile, that same court is weighing Uniloc’s challenges of two rulings with an already sweeping impact: an order finding that Uniloc lacked standing when it sued Alphabet (Google) based on a provision from its funding agreements with Fortress, and another in litigation against Apple that forced the NPE to unseal a swath of documents detailing its licensing activity.

The Supreme Court’s Alice decision once provided a key offramp for defendants hoping to challenge patent eligibility, but subsequent decisions have narrowed their ability to succeed with such motions in the early stages of district court litigation. Meanwhile, the ever-expanding body of caselaw applying Alice has remained a point of contention for some stakeholders. As the Supreme Court considers one prominent Alice appeal, disagreements over the proper scope of Section 101 have been reflected in recent public commentary and have spilled over into Congress as legislators ponder reforms. Here, RPX takes a closer look at those tensions and provides a breakdown of the latest data on patent eligibility.

Quarterhill Inc. (f/k/a Wi-Lan Inc.) has announced the acquisition of a portfolio of patents described as relating to “wired connectivity functionality, including USB-C technologies used in various applications such as desktop and laptop computers, tablets, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and smart TVs”. Assignment records recently made public indicate the likely source of the patents—per Quarterhill, a “publicly-traded leader in semiconductor technologies”—as well as the subsidiary recipients.

Just before Thanksgiving in the US, the July 2021 assignment of a portfolio of wireless charging patents from a prolific named inventor, via a California LLC, to top NPE plaintiff IP Edge LLC appeared in publicly available USPTO assignment records, as did the assignment of a couple of US patents from Korea University Research and Business Foundation (KURBF). The recipients, each an LLC associated with the Texas monetization firm, have yet to file suit or move assets to other IP Edge plaintiffs for assertion, at least according to such records, but the portfolios join three other batches of patents recently acquired by IP Edge, several of which have already appeared in litigation.

Ward Participations BV has expanded its sole litigation campaign, begun with a Western District of Texas suit filed against Samsung in August 2021, with new cases, filed separately in the same district, against American Express (6:21-cv-01190), Bank of America (6:21-cv-01191), Citigroup (6:21-cv-01194), JPMorgan Chase (6:21-cv-01193), and Wells Fargo (6:21-cv-01195). The inventor-controlled plaintiff targets the provision of payment cards (all but Wells Fargo) and mobile apps (all JPMorgan Chase) as used with or compatible with Samsung Pay.

The Federal Circuit has ordered District Judge Alan D. Albright to transfer several more cases out of his courtroom, reversing prior denials of motions to transfer for convenience. These latest decisions build on a growing number of writs of mandamus that cement a clear appellate position: a district court abuses its discretion when it denies a defendant transfer to a more convenient forum, based on the other applicable factors, because “court congestion”—i.e., the West Texas court’s ability and willingness to set a relatively aggressive case schedule—is viewed to weigh against transfer, however heavily.