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Under Pressure from Another Debt Financing Deal, Inventergy Ends 2018 with a Burst of New Litigation
Patent Market, Patent Watch
In January 2018, shortly after securing $2.4M in debt financing from a hedge fund, Inventergy Global, Inc. (through affiliate Inventergy LBS LLC) opened up a new campaign, targeting GPS tracking devices. Perhaps feeling the pressure of the steep repayment demands of its deal with TCA’s Global Credit Master Fund, Inventergy recently escalated its litigation efforts, filing seven new cases in the past six weeks. Each of the new cases asserts at least one of three related patents generally concerning communication with a tracking device; the patents were developed by GTX Corp, a self-described “pioneer in the GPS wearable tech industry”.
December 27, 2018
Bell Northern Research Expands Campaign, Adding Patents and Hitting LG Electronics
New Patent Litigation
Bell Northern Research, LLC, a Hilco Inc. (d/b/a Hilco Global) company, has added a lawsuit against LG Electronics (LGE) (3:18-cv-02864) to its sole litigation campaign, begun this past August with cases targeting devices provided by Huawei, Kyocera, Yulong Computer Communications (Coolpad Technologies), and ZTE. With the new complaint, ten patents from a portfolio of thousands received in December 2017 from Broadcom have been asserted across the campaign. LGE is accused of infringing eight of those patents through the provision of a wide array of products: cell phones compatible with certain 3GPP cellular standards and/or 802.11n or 802.11ac Wi-Fi; tablets supporting those Wi-Fi standards, some of which also offer 3GPP compatibility; various other “home or office electronics products” supporting those Wi-Fi standards, including “laptop computers, televisions, home theater equipment, and Blu-Ray or DVD players”; and “home appliance products” supporting those Wi-Fi standards, including “refrigerators, washers, and dryers”.
December 27, 2018
NetSoc Social Networking Campaign Tags Four More Platforms
New Patent Litigation
NetSoc, LLC has sued Microsoft (LinkedIn) (1:18-cv-12215), Quora (1:18-cv-11250), Teladoc Health (2:18-cv-00542), and Verizon (Yahoo) (1:18-cv-12267) over the same social networking patent that it asserted in earlier cases in the campaign against IAC/Interactive (Match Group) (filed in May) and Chegg (filed in November). The NPE targets the defendants’ websites/platforms, the accused features allowing users to locate and communicate with others (doctors, tutors, other professionals, etc.). NetSoc has twice dismissed without prejudice its case against Match Group, first to move the litigation to the Eastern District of Texas (from the Northern District), and second out of recognition that Match Group no longer maintains a physical office there.
December 27, 2018
Apple Sued by Payment Startup Linked to Entrepreneur Once Dubbed “Trump with a Maine Accent”
New Patent Litigation
Apple has been hit by a lawsuit filed by Fintiv, Inc., an Austin-based startup that purportedly offers white-label e-commerce services and related mobile apps (6:18-cv-00372). The company alleges that Apple has infringed a single patent through the provision of products supporting contactless payments and that offer a mobile wallet app, including various models of iPhone and Apple Watch as used with the related Apple Wallet app. Fintiv acquired the asserted patent from an apparent subsidiary of Mozido, a once-promising payment startup hobbled by problematic investments and by SEC fraud charges brought against its founder, former real estate developer Michael Liberty, who recently finished an unrelated prison sentence for campaign finance violations. Mozido and Fintiv appear to be closely linked: the two companies share several executives, while Fintiv’s board includes a cousin of Michael Liberty who once ran the entrepreneur’s family foundation.
December 24, 2018
Sequoia Technology DJed After Suing Multiple Red Hat Customers as Exclusive Licensee of ETRI Patent
New Patent Litigation
Red Hat (1:18-cv-02027) has filed an action in the District of Delaware seeking declaratory judgments that neither it nor its customers infringe a patent asserted by Sequoia Technology LLC in earlier cases brought against Dell (EMC), Hitachi, HP Enterprise (HPE), and Super Micro Computer. Red Hat pleads that in its complaints, Sequoia pointed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) materials to support its infringement allegations against those defendants, giving rise to a reasonable apprehension of suit. Sequoia brought those cases as the exclusive licensee of the patent-in-suit, which generally relates to managing the storage of metadata. USPTO records identify Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) as the patent’s owner.
December 22, 2018
IP Edge LTE Base Station Campaign Bursts Back to Life
New Patent Litigation
Zavala Licensing LLC, an apparent affiliate of monetization firm IP Edge LLC, has revived its litigation campaign, which saw a short burst of initial activity in late 2017. The NPE has asserted the same patent, broadly pertaining to radio communications, against BaiCells Technologies (2:18-cv-00543), Ericsson (2:18-cv-00544), and Samsung (2:18-cv-00545) in the Eastern District of Texas, and ZTE (3:18-cv-03390) in the Northern District of that state. At issue are the defendants’ LTE base stations that allegedly comply with the LTE Release 8 standard. In October 2017, Zavala sued Airspan Networks, General Dynamics Mission Systems (GDMS), Nextivity, Thales, and Wilson Electronics (d/b/a Weboost), each of which cases was dismissed by mid-December 2017, all but the suit against GDMS without prejudice.
December 21, 2018
Retailers of Roku Products Join Roku as Defendants in Set Top Box Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Inventor-controlled MV3 Partners LLC has added cases against two retailers—Best Buy (6:18-cv-00374) and Kohl’s (6:18-cv-00373)—to the suit that it filed this past October directly against Roku (6:18-cv-00308), all in the Western District of Texas. The complaints all assert a single patent, generally related to mobile set top boxes. The October suit targets Roku’s manufacture and sale of Roku TV, Roku’s media players, such as the Roku Ultra, Roku Express, Roku Express+, Roku Premiere, Roku Premiere+, Roku Streaming Stick, Roku Streaming Stick+, and Roku’s related Roku mobile app. The new suits take aim at the retailers’ sale of such Roku streaming media devices.
December 20, 2018
Exclusive Licensee of Patents and Copyrights Held by Texas A&M Alleges Infringement by Broadcom
New Patent Litigation
TexasLDPC Inc. (d/b/a Symbyon Systems) has begun litigating a family of low-density parity check decoder (LDPC) patents held by the Texas A&M University System, of which the plaintiff pleads that it is the exclusive licensee under a June 18, 2015 agreement. The new complaint targets Broadcom (1:18-cv-01966) over the provision of SSD controllers and Wi-Fi chipsets supporting 802.11ac and 802.11ad. The accused products allegedly contain LDPC decoders, which the complaint describes as “decod[ing] data that has been encoded using an LDPC code, a type of error correcting code”.
December 19, 2018
Missouri LLC Formed by an Inventor in Italy Sues Facebook in Delaware
New Patent Litigation
Villmer LLC, a Missouri entity created by sole named inventor of the patent-in-suit Jason Villmer, has filed suit against Facebook (Facebook Technologies f/k/a Oculus VR) (1:18-cv-01952). That patent broadly pertains to head-mounted displays, with Villmer’s infringement allegations focusing on Facebook’s head-mounted virtual reality (VR) devices, the Oculus Go and the upcoming, unreleased Oculus Quest.
December 18, 2018
Dynamic Data Continues to Assert Patents from Its Growing Portfolio
New Patent Litigation
In a case filed last week, Dynamic Data Technologies, LLC accuses Intel (1:18-cv-01977) of infringing 11 of the patents that it recently acquired from MaxLinear. A range of products are accused, including processors that offer “Localized Adaptive Contrast Control” (a feature that controls the contrast in a displayed image); processors supporting “Multi-Media Samples (‘MMS’) Version 1.3”, which “contain[s] functionality for generating a mosaic program guide” (a digital TV guide feature that displays a single frame from a video program for each TV program entry); processors offering certain versions of Intel Quick Sync Video (a hardware-based video encoder) along with a GPU, with certain video encoding features at issue; Intel RealSense products, which include depth-sensing cameras; and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) Video Image Processing (VIP) Suite IP cores, with certain video processing features at issue. Intel joins a dozen other companies already defendants in the campaign, including Alphabet (Google), AMD, Apple, Amazon, Dell, HTC, LG Electronics, MediaTek, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
December 15, 2018