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Gaming Campaign Expands Ahead of Joint Claim Construction Hearing in Texas
New Patent Litigation
Sony (2:19-cv-00248) has been added as a defendant in a gaming campaign headed toward a mid-August joint claim construction hearing in Texas. Terminal Reality Inc. and Infernal Technology, LLC, as patent owner and exclusive licensee, respectively, accuse Sony of infringing two patents—generally related to lighting and shadowing in computer graphics—through the provision of game engines “that are capable of performing deferred rendering, deferred shading, deferred lighting, physically based shading, and/or physically based rendering”, as well as through the provision of video games allegedly developed using those engines, including Everquest Next, Gran Turismo Sport, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the inFAMOUS series, and Knack.
July 11, 2019
Inventor-Controlled Entity Launches Image Correction Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Inventor-controlled Optimum Imaging Technologies LLC has filed suit against Canon (2:19-cv-00246) over the provision of certain cameras and camcorders, including EOS series cameras, PowerShot series cameras, the VIXIA HF G50 camcorder, and the XA20 camcorder. At issue is the “lens aberration correction” feature included in the software of the devices, with two patents—generally related to in-camera systems for filtering and correcting distortions—asserted.
July 10, 2019
Touchscreen Campaign Expands with Ten New Patents Asserted in District Court, as the ITC Institutes an Investigation Against the Same Defendants over the Prior Four
New Patent Litigation
Neodrón Limited has expanded the campaign that it began both in the Western District of Texas and before the International Trade Commission (ITC) in May. The NPE has filed a second set of Western District of Texas suits against prior defendants/respondents Amazon (6:19-cv-00395), Dell (6:19-cv-00396), Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) (6:19-cv-00398), Microsoft (6:19-cv-00399), and Samsung (6:19-cv-00400), while adding HP (6:19-cv-00397) as a defendant for the first time. (Neodron has also filed an amended complaint in a May case against HP Enterprise, naming HP as the defendant in that action instead.) The new raft of complaints adds ten more patents to the four already asserted in the campaign, all of them acquired from Microchip in December 2018. At issue are various computing devices of the defendants that have touchpads or touchscreens.
July 7, 2019
Federal Circuit Affirms Most of Cisco Reexam Win Against VirnetX
Patent Litigation Feature, Patent Market
The Federal Circuit has largely upheld an invalidity ruling for Cisco against a patent asserted by VirnetX, Inc. throughout its long-running litigation campaign. On June 28, the court reversed the invalidation of three claims cancelled in a Cisco inter partes reexamination, ruling that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) had erred by not considering certain arguments and by not making certain factual findings. It therefore remanded the case for further consideration of those claims (2018-1751), after affirming the PTAB’s invalidation of 33 other claims from the same patent, finding no reversible error in that portion of the Board’s analysis. The affected patent has been asserted in multiple VirnetX cases that have gone to trial, including one that led to a 2013 noninfringement verdict as to Cisco and several verdicts involving Apple, some of which have been overturned amidst an ongoing appellate battle between Apple and the NPE.
July 7, 2019
Sisvel Expands Networking Campaign by One Defendant but Many More Patents
New Patent Litigation
Sisvel International S.A. (d/b/a Sisvel Group) has added another District of Delaware case, this one against Dell (1:19-cv-01247), to the litigation campaign that it began there with early June suits against AnyDATA, BLU Products, Cradlepoint, Honeywell, Verifone, and Xirgo Technologies. Those cases saw five former Nokia patents asserted, each of which Dell is accused of infringing as well, but the new suit adds accusations as to seven former BlackBerry patents. At issue is Dell’s provision of the 5510 Mobile Broadband Wireless Cellular Modem, Latitude 5000 and 7000 Series computers, the Precision 3520 Workstation laptop, and the Precision 7000 Series computers.
July 6, 2019
Image Capture and Editing Campaign Grows to Include a Dozen Patents, of Disparate Original Sources, All Received from IV
New Patent Litigation
Cedar Lane Technologies Inc. has added an Eastern District of Texas suit against Panasonic (2:19-cv-00241) to the campaign that it began in May by suing first Advert Tech in the Northern District of Illinois and then Photonics Management and Teledyne Digital Imaging in the District of Delaware. The NPE had just received roughly 50 patents formerly held by Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). In early June, Cedar Lane added to the campaign another Illinois suit, against 123RF, and another Delaware case, against PicMonkey. The complaint against Panasonic asserts three of those patents, all generally related to image capture or correction, targeting the defendant over the provision of the Lumix GX880, DMC-FZ100, and DMC-GH2 cameras.
July 6, 2019
Ride App and Vehicle Location Campaigns See New Activity
New Patent Litigation
Hailo Technologies, LLC has recently revived two of its three litigation campaigns to date and may yet revive the third. The NPE just added a case against Safr Technologies (1:19-cv-01139) to a June case against Juno (1:19-cv-01139) and May cases against Curb Mobility (1:19-cv-00945), Flywheel Software (1:19-cv-00949), and Via Transportation (1:19-cv-00946) in a campaign over a taxi dispatch patent that emerged from a reexamination triggered by Hailo itself with all claims found patentable as amended to avoid patent-ineligibility under Alice. In the second campaign, Hailo has recently added suits against Anker Innovations (2:19-cv-00751) and Moovn Technologies (2:19-cv-00958) over a patent generally related to locating a parked vehicle. In the third campaign, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) handed down a final written decision in an inter partes review (IPR) that found no challenged claims of a different taxi dispatch patent unpatentable under the arguments presented in a petition filed by Unified Patents.
July 6, 2019
USPTO Records Reveal Transaction Between IV and Native American Tribe
Patent Market, Patent Watch
This past week, the USPTO posted a late 2018 patent assignment from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) to MEC Management, LLC, an NPE “formed under the tribal laws” of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. That tribe was the subject of considerable press in 2017, when it launched a litigation campaign (via affiliate MEC Resources, LLC) amid a heated public debate over the issue of tribal sovereign immunity.
July 6, 2019
Alice Survival Keeps Cookies Campaign Against Retailers...Baking
New Patent Litigation
TMI Solutions LLC, an affiliate of Strategic Intellectual Solutions, LLC (SIS), has targeted a second group of retailers in its cookies campaign, after the two patents-in-suit—generally related to client-server communications—survived an Alice challenge in the first round. The NPE has tagged Barnes & Noble (1:19-cv-01229), CVS (1:19-cv-01230), Etsy (1:19-cv-01231), H&M (1:19-cv-01232), Hobby Lobby (1:19-cv-01233), Home Depot (1:19-cv-01234), Mary Kay (1:19-cv-01235), and OfficeMax (1:19-cv-01236) in the District of Delaware, where last September, District Judge Leonard P. Stark ruled, citing Berkheimer, that while the asserted patents’ claims are directed to an abstract idea (“exchanging information for the purpose of identification”), the first-round defendants failed to persuade the court, at least at the Rule 12 stage, that the claim limitations are “well-understood, routine, and conventional computer technology at the time of the invention”.
July 6, 2019
Cloud-Based Multimedia Platform at Issue in Third LF Capital Partners Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Three affiliates of LF Capital Partners, LLC have launched litigation campaigns in the space of a month, each over patents received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) in December 2018. Computing Resource Technology LLC (CRT), a recently formed LF Capital affiliate, is the latest to do so; on June 28, the NPE sued Forbidden Technologies (d/b/a Blackbird) (1:19-cv-01237) over a single patent generally related to exchanging and manipulating multimedia files in a distributed computing environment. Blackbird is accused of infringement through the provision of its video platform, with CRT also calling out the inclusion of online video-editing software, FORscene.
July 5, 2019