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Last week, Delaware District Judge Colm F. Connolly issued orders considering two magistrate recommendations: a first, agreeing that a case filed against Apple and Visa by inventor-controlled Universal Secure Registry LLC (USR) should not be transferred to the Northern District of California; and a second, disagreeing that a motion challenging the four patents at issue in that same case under Alice should be denied. In the latter, Judge Connolly ruled that the asserted claims are patent-ineligibly directed to the abstract idea of “the secure verification of a person’s identity”, ending the litigation. Though less consequential in light of that Alice ruling, litigants before Judge Connolly may still want to take note that the transfer denial order does reinforce an expansive reading of one of the relevant factors.

At the start of June, Teleputers, LLC filed its first patent litigation, suing Marvell Semiconductor in the Western District of Texas over two patents naming as one of its inventors Ruby B. Lee, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University. The plaintiff finished the month accusing Renesas (6:20-cv-00599) of infringing the same two patents, in a second West Texas complaint targeting certain systems-on-chip (SoCs) based on the ARM NEON architectures. Teleputers also hit Oracle (6:20-cv-00600) there, over a third Lee patent, also generally related to instructions in a programmable processor, targeting the Oracle Solaris 11 Operating System (including Oracle SPARC and Oracle x86 Servers shipped with Oracle Solaris 11).

Earlier this year, an assignment from Shanghai Langbo Communication Technology—a self-described “IP-centric start-up company” focused on “4G and 5G SEP creation”—to Sisvel International S.A. came to light. Now, a second assignment by Langbo has surfaced, this time to Chris Dubuc’s new monetization firm Harfang IP Investment Corp (d/b/a Harfang IP), suggesting that the research lab, founded in 2013, is exploring options for monetizing its “5G patents”.

The expansion of Zipit Wireless, Inc.’s litigation has abruptly reversed. Earlier in 2020, the plaintiff had sued LG Electronics (LGE), a case that was stayed in mid-May to await the outcome of trials instituted by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) over petitions for inter partes review (IPR) of the two patents-in-suit. Undeterred, Zipit hit Alphabet (Google), Apple, BLU Products, HTC, Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), Microsoft, Nokia, Panasonic, Sony, TCL (TTE Technology), and ZTE in multiple districts last month. However, in the last week of June, the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed, without prejudice, each of those new complaints. One of the prior defendants, Apple, has responded by filing a complaint of its own (3:20-cv-04448), in the Northern District of California this time, seeking declaratory judgments that it does not infringe either patent asserted in the dismissed complaint.

After taking aim at prior defendants in a spree of newly filed and refiled suits in June 2020, WSOU Investments, LLC (d/b/a Brazos Licensing and Development) has now directed its attention to Alphabet (Google) with 15 new Western District of Texas suits (6:20-cv-00573; 6:20-cv-00574; 6:20-cv-00579; 6:20-cv-00575; 6:20-cv-00576; 6:20-cv-00572; 6:20-cv-00577; 6:20-cv-00571; 6:20-cv-00578; 6:20-cv-00582; 6:20-cv-00585; 6:20-cv-00581; 6:20-cv-00584; 6:20-cv-00580; 6:20-cv-00583). WSOU asserts in each complaint a single patent from a large portfolio of assets received from Nokia (including from Alcatel-Lucent) since 2017. Together, the 15 new suits target a wide range of Google products and services.

Sable Networks, Inc. and Sable IP, LLC (as patent owner and exclusive licensee, respectively) have filed yet another suit, hitting HP Enterprise (HPE) (Aruba Networks) (5:20-cv-00120) in the Eastern District of Texas, where the plaintiffs have already sued Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks. Sable has also filed suit against Cisco, Dell (EMC), and Juniper Networks in the Western District of Texas, all of the cases asserting patents originating with Caspian Networks (f/k/a Packetcom, LLC). As in the previous cases, Sable targets the provision of various HPE/Aruba networking devices.

Monetization firm IP Edge LLC finished out June with half a dozen new litigation campaigns, two of which were covered last week—a campaign targeting geographic connections drawn between geographic locations by Lyft’s Driver app, initiated by Boxey Tech LLC (details here), and a battery management campaign, initiated by Syclone IP LLC against Sony (details here). Coretek Licensing LLC, another IP Edge plaintiff, also launched its first litigation, suing HCL Technologies (1:20-cv-04996), Mitel Networks (1:20-cv-00873), Snap (1:20-cv-00874), TeamViewer (1:20-cv-00875), and Zoom (1:20-cv-00876) over the provision of certain VoIP-related features within the defendants’ mobile apps, including HCL SameTime, MiCollab, Snapchat, Blizz, and Zoom, respectively.

Two of IP Edge LLC’s end-of-June litigation campaigns litigate patents received from a familiar source, individual inventor Prashant Parikh. Plaintiff Mountech IP LLC has sued BlackBerry (1:20-cv-00865), Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) (1:20-cv-00867), LG Electronics (LGE) (1:20-cv-00866), Samsung (1:20-cv-05029), and ZTE (2:20-cv-01014). Two Parikh patents, broadly directed to computing contextual associations between character strings through “documents in the character entry system” and completing incomplete character strings through the computed data, are asserted against each defendant, with Mountech IP targeting the provision of smartphones that feature a predictive text system, including the Blackberry KEYone, Motorola G6 Forge, LG Risio 3, Samsung Galaxy Note 10, and ZTE Blade T2 Lite, respectively.

The other new IP Edge LLC campaign, launched at the end of June over a Prashant Parikh patent, has been initiated by Hitel Technologies LLC, which sued Giorgio Armani (6:20-cv-00590), Gucci (6:20-cv-00592), Levi Strauss (6:20-cv-00589), and Nike (6:20-cv-00591) over the provision of e-commerce websites allowing product browsing. The asserted patent generally relates to processing searched keywords to determine associations between “user-navigable nodes”.

IP Edge LLC plaintiff Topdown Licensing LLC initiated the sixth new litigation campaign of the firm last month, suing Ableton (1:20-cv-00888), AlphaTheta (1:20-cv-00889), Gibson Brands (1:20-cv-00890), Native Instruments (2:20-cv-05800), and Sound United (1:20-cv-00891) over the provision of DJ controllers and related software. The three patents-in-campaign, each asserted against all of the defendants, generally relate to instruments for composing music through programmable controls.