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You Can’t Get Blood from a Stone
Patent Litigation Feature
In February 2023, Northern District of Texas Judge Brantley Starr shifted attorney fees in favor of defendant VMware, ordering ZT IP, LLC to pay VMware $92,130.35 within 30 days of that order. The court deemed the case exceptional, in part, because the accused product was released in 2002, a full year before the application that led to the patent asserted in the case; per Judge Starr, “VMware provided all the information for ZT to quickly realize that it had no claim and that it should have dropped the suit before any of the parties spent unnecessary fees”. Not “a single dime” received from ZT IP by August of last year, VMware propounded post-judgment discovery and filed motions to amend the judgment and to join additional parties, including Dynamic IP Deals LLC (d/b/a DynaIP) and its principal Carlos O. Gorrichategui, Entente IP, LLC and its principal David Ghorbanpoor, Pueblo Nuevo LLC (but not its principal Hernan Arturo Perez Torrijos), and litigation counsel Ramey LLP and its principal William P. Ramey III. By December 2023, though, having expended tens of thousands more dollars trying to collect the fees owed from ZT IP, which VMware characterizes as a “judgment-proof shell company”, VMware withdrew its motions, and just this month, Judge Starr granted Ramey LLP’s motion to withdraw from the suit.
April 19, 2024
Email Storage Suit Targets Microsoft
New Patent Litigation
Characterizing itself as an “ISO 9001:2015 certified firm that is committed to providing the highest quality of IT sales and services”, Sterling Computers Corporation has sued Microsoft (1:24-cv-00406) over the provision of its Exchange Online platform, targeting features related to “mail flow rules”. In the new Western District of Texas complaint, the plaintiff asserts a single patent generally related to an electronic messaging system with a “governance module”, the pleading characterizing the patent as covering an “object-based messaging invention” that allows each message in an email thread to be stored only once.
April 19, 2024
Casio Computer and Wheels Sued in Empire IP Plaintiff’s Wireless Communications Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Fleet Connect Solutions LLC (FCS), a plaintiff associated with Texas monetization firm Empire IP LLC, has expanded its sole litigation campaign with separate suits against Casio Computer (2:24-cv-00240), in the Eastern District of Texas, and Wheels (1:24-cv-01563), in the Northern District of Georgia. The plaintiff asserts 13 wireless communications patents in overlapping sets, each received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). FCS alleges infringement through the provision of devices that support Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11ac/b/n, and/or LTE connectivity: for Casio, certain wireless label printers and smartwatches; and for Wheels, its fleet management and vehicle telematics solutions (including certain Geotab-branded products).
April 19, 2024
Q1 NPE Litigation Jumps, Year over Year
In Case You Missed It
Compared to the same quarter last year, NPE litigation moved upward by 24 percent in the first quarter of 2024. One of the factors providing context to that rise is the substantial exit from the scene of the former top filer, which began all the way back in December 2022 but the effect of which has only now truly dissipated.
April 14, 2024
Transacted VoIP Portfolio Appears in USPTO Assignment Records
In Case You Missed It
Publicly available USPTO assignment records now reflect the assignment of more than 700 patent assets from an operating company to Arlington Technologies, LLC, a subsidiary of Texas monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC. The transaction is dated March 29, 2024, with the portfolio described as “valuable technology resources for companies worldwide that want to provide the best possible VOIP service and care to their customers”.
April 14, 2024
Delaware Judgment Appears to End Long-Running Post-Settlement Dispute
In Case You Missed It
Late last month, District of Delaware Judge Gregory B. Williams appears to have disposed of all of the many claims that hung over the distribution of a $125M settlement that ended the campaign of ChanBond, LLC in June 2021. The parties to the case include CBV, Inc., the inventor-controlled source of the patents asserted against 13 cable providers from 2015-2017; Deirdre Leane, formerly with IP Navigation Group, LLC (d/b/a IPNav); and IPNav, LLC, a Texas entity that she created in the wake of IPNav’s winddown, but other parties relevant to this complicated dispute also include UnifiedOnline, Inc. (UOI), ChanBond’s parent; the shareholders of UOI, which sought to intervene in the lawsuit; William (“Billy”) Carter, the CEO of UOI; Omni Bridgeway Limited (f/k/a IMF Bentham Limited), the litigation funder here; and Mishcon de Reya, litigation counsel.
April 14, 2024
Illinois Jury Returns Infringement Verdict for Kove IO in Cloud Storage Suit Against Amazon
Patent Litigation Feature
Inventor-controlled Kove IO, Inc. has won an infringement verdict in its litigation against Amazon. On April 10, an Illinois jury found that the company had infringed three distributed network storage patents through its Simple Storage System (S3) and DynamoDB products and awarded $525M in damages, though it also determined that this infringement had not been willful. Litigation leading up to that trial dealt in part with the impact of certain ex parte reexaminations (EPRs) against the asserted patents, after the district judge found that the patent owner had disclaimed certain subject matter through statements made in those proceedings.
April 13, 2024
IPValue’s Monterey Research Sues Renesas, Alleged Customer DENSO
New Patent Litigation
Monterey Research, LLC has brought four more patents into the litigation campaign that it began back in November 2019. It has done so through a new Eastern District of Texas suit filed against both DENSO and Renesas Electronics (2:24-cv-00238), DENSO as the alleged customer of the wide array of accused semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, including certain embedded flash memory devices, as well as microcontrollers. Past defendants in this campaign include AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, and Qualcomm, as well as Nanya Technology and STMicro, the cases against which are on the verge of closure after extensive activity before the USPTO over the patents asserted there.
April 13, 2024
Datamonitor Systems Returns to Court
New Patent Litigation
More than a year after a resolution of the case filed by Datamonitor Systems LLC against IBM led to a dismissal with prejudice, the plaintiff has returned to litigation. Datamonitor has sued Cisco (6:24-cv-00186) and Sophos (6:24-cv-00185) in separate Western District of Texas complaints, over the provision of the Firewall Management Center and Unified Threat Management “intrusion detection and prevention system[s]”, respectively.
April 12, 2024
Daedalus Prime Sues MediaTek Alone in Latest Complaint
New Patent Litigation
In August 2022, Daedalus Prime LLC, an entity associated with Daedalus Group LLC, launched its sole litigation campaign with a set of actions, one before the International Trade Commission (ITC) against MediaTek, NXP Semiconductors, certain automakers, and certain automaker suppliers; and three filed in the District of Delaware, one centered around each of MediaTek, NXP, and Qualcomm (but naming as defendants subsets of the proposed ITC respondents). Now, the plaintiff has sued MediaTek (2:24-cv-00235) alone, this time in the Eastern District of Texas. The asserted patents, described in the complaint as “relate[d] to groundbreaking improvements to microprocessor circuitry”, are broadly directed to various aspects of computer circuitry and semiconductor fabrication. The defendant is accused of infringement through the provision of devices containing microprocessors and systems-on-chip (SoCs), including certain Dimensity-series SoCs, that are based on the ARMv8.2 architecture and later.
April 12, 2024