In October 2022, DivX, LLC filed two complaints against Amazon and VIZIO, one before the International Trade Commission (ITC) and the other in the Eastern District of Virginia. The latter was stayed in customary fashion to await the outcome of the ITC investigation, which resulted in a May 2024 finding in favor of Amazon (VIZIO having been terminated from the ITC investigation along the way), based on, among other things, noninfringement. Last week, DivX voluntarily dismissed that parallel stayed case, doing so on the same day that it filed a new complaint in the same district against Amazon (3:24-cv-00818), this one asserting six different patents.

In a new Eastern District of Texas complaint, coplaintiffs Malikie Innovations Limited (as “the successor-in-interest to a substantial patent portfolio created and procured over many years by [BlackBerry]”) and Key Patent Innovations Limited (KPI, as “the beneficiary of a trust pursuant to which Malikie owns, holds, and asserts the Asserted Patents”) have accused Sophos (2:24-cv-00905) of infringing seven of those former BlackBerry patents. Five of them are new to this campaign, which has now seen complaints filed against Acer, ASUSTek, D-Link, Nintendo, and Sophos, in that order, since March of this year. All cases remain “active”, although a stay has been imposed to facilitate a resolution in the D-Link case, and ASUSTek, the Taiwanese parent company, has mounted a novel challenge to venue in the Eastern District of Texas.

CLOUD SYSTEMS HOLDCO IP LLC (CSHIP) has filed suit against Savant Systems (1:24-cv-08502) in the Southern District of New York. The patent-in-suit generally relates to controlling an “environment” through a server and a control client, just one from five asserted across the roughly 20 complaints that have been filed in this campaign since its October 2022 start. The accused products are certain media/music servers (“the PAV-SIPA devices (SIPA1SM, SIPA50SM, SIPA125SM)”) together with apps used to control them. The new complaint drops a couple of weeks after the USPTO canceled, via ex parte reexam (EPR), all 20 claims of one of the asserted patent’s family members.

e-Beacon LLC has fired off separate Eastern District of Texas complaints against NEC (2:24-cv-00891), OnePlus (2:24-cv-00889), Progressive Casualty Insurance (2:24-cv-00892), Samsung (2:24-cv-00890), and Sony (2:24-cv-00893). The round comes after the first in this campaign, filed this past June, hit ADT (since dismissed with prejudice after a noticed settlement) in the Eastern District of Texas; Apple (without prejudice) and Uber (also without prejudice), in the Western District of Texas. Each case ended by the middle of September, in the manner parenthetically suggested. The start to this campaign—which concerns a single patent generally related to transmitting the location of a “VoIP phone” to an emergency services call center—suggests it will be conducted in file-and-dismiss fashion.

Apparent Blue Wave IP plaintiff EDGE NETWORKING SYSYEMS LLC (ENS), filing as “Edge Networking Systems LLC”, has followed up its February case against Microsoft, in the Western District of Texas, with an Eastern District of Texas suit against Amazon (2:24-cv-00887) over the same three networking patents. Infringement allegations target the provision of the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (“EKS”) Web Services and products incorporating thereof (i.e., Amazon Aurora, Amazon SageMaker, and Industrial Data Fabric). A motion to dismiss the Microsoft case is fully briefed before District Judge David A. Ezra.

VDPP LLC has filed two new complaints, one in the Southern District of New York against TATA Motors (Jaguar Land Rover North America) (2:24-cv-10029), targeting the provision of the Jaguar Surround View System, and another in the Southern District of New York against Savant Systems (1:24-cv-08139), targeting the provision of certain surveillance cameras. Two different patents are asserted, both from a family broadly directed to modified images and/or videos. New counsel for VDPP has filed the complaints in each forum, as former mainstay Ramey LLP moves on an emergency basis to protect the retirement account of its principal, in light of an earlier order holding him jointly and severally liable for $207K in shifted attorney fees.

Delaware plaintiff NetMomentum LLC has filed its first litigation, launching two campaigns by suing ASUSTek (2:24-cv-00841) over a patent entitled “Semi-transparent RFID tags” in one campaign and in the other, Panasonic (2:24-cv-00844), VTech Holdings (2:24-cv-00843), and Yealink Network Technology (2:24-cv-00846), each over a single patent generally related to a base station that handles both mobile and landline telephone calls. Against ASUSTek, NetMomentum targets the provision of the Zenfone 9 smartphone, focusing in the other three complaints on the provision of telephones with a base unit and a wireless handset. All four complaints have been filed in the Eastern District of Texas.

One well-established monetization operation has announced the acquisition of a portfolio of patents from Innolux, while another is the recipient of yet another batch of patents assembled and divested from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). Meanwhile, a newer monetization team has picked up a set of patents from an operating company in a move suggesting that litigation over the received assets is coming.

Last week, in long-running litigation, a Central District of California jury returned a verdict in favor of funded plaintiff SPEX Technologies, Inc., finding that Western Digital infringed a single claim from one patent generally related to securing a peripheral computing device. The jury apportioned damages for the provision of two accused hard disk drives, roughly $194M for the My Book and roughly $122M for the Ultrastar He10. The eight-year run of this case included two stays, a trip up to the Federal Circuit, and the decimation of SPEX’s planned damages case, forcing the plaintiff to present a facts-only theory without the benefit of expert opinion.

VB Assets, LLC has filed an Eastern District of Texas complaint against Samsung (2:24-cv-00828), targeting the provision of the Bixby 2.0 voice assistant and supporting devices such as earbuds, home appliances, smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, TVs, and more. The plaintiff previously asserted four of the six former VoiceBox patents appearing in the new complaint against Amazon, two of which were the partial subject of a District of Delaware verdict in VB Assets favor last November. A couple of weeks ago, District Judge Maryellen Noreika ruled on the parties’ posttrial motions in that case, trimming the jury’s running royalty award down from $46.7M to just over $40M based on a judgment as a matter of law that no reasonable jury could have found one of the four tried claims infringed. Characterizing itself as “ill-equipped to assess whether the jury’s awarded royalty rate would be an appropriate rate for the ongoing royalty”, the court asked for supplemental briefing concerning that calculation; VB Assets just made its submission.