Eastern District of Texas Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap has adopted the report of Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne recommending the denial of a Penney OpCo (d/b/a JCPenney) motion challenging patents asserted by Nearby Systems LLC, an Empire IP LLC plaintiff, against it under Alice. JCPenney argued that the claims of those patents are ineligibly directed to the abstract idea of “combining mapping data into a single map”; Judge Payne disagreed, recommending that “[w]hile the value and novelty of such a configuration is not at issue under §101, the Court is satisfied that it is sufficiently concrete to survive §101”. The court’s order likely dooms a parallel motion filed by another defendant in the campaign, Dollar General, which remains pending before Judges Payne and Gilstrap.

Two portfolios assigned to entities tied to patent monetization professionals are worth noting this week: one from the same source as that chip packaging portfolio highlighted a couple of weeks ago and one to a recipient with ties that suggest that litigation over the transacted assets is coming.

Inventor-backed Advanced Cluster Systems, Inc. (ACS) has revived its sole litigation campaign, launched in October 2019 with a suit against NVIDIA, with separate cases against Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) (7:24-cv-00244) and Intel (7:24-cv-00245) in the Western of Texas. The five asserted patents, four of which are asserted in litigation for the first time, are broadly directed to cluster computing. AMD is accused of infringement through the provision of server and workstation products that use AMD’s MI-series accelerators, as well the accelerators themselves; and Intel, over server and workstation products that use Intel’s Habana AI-series accelerator products, the accelerators themselves, and certain Xeon Scalable Processor-series products.

Riccardo Vieri has filed an Eastern District of Texas complaint against Intuit (2:24-cv-00774) targeting the provision of features for sending “automated and personalized SMS messages to [] customers” within the Intuit Mailchimp platform. The asserted patent is broadly directed to a contextual advertisement system that uses an SMS messaging system. The plaintiff pleads that “[h]e wants to litigate in a United States District Court that has a repeatable time to trial in patent infringement litigation of less than two years. The Eastern District of Texas meets this criteria, and is more convenient for him than anywhere else in the United States due to its location and safety when compared to other” US district courts.

LaVoult.com, LLC has filed what appears to be its first litigation, suing Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) (5:24-cv-06724) in the Northern District of California over the provision of “disappearing messaging functionality offered through Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp”. A single patent generally related to “unsend" features in applications with private and nonprivate (e.g., social) communication modes is asserted in the new complaint.

In addition to the suggestive transfer of a portfolio of chip packing patents, reported here last week, publicly available USPTO assignment records reveal a transacted portfolio of “cloud computing and datacenter” patents taking shape in new hands, as well as 30 issued US patents generally related to biometric fingerprint sensors moving to a vehicle formed last year under the management of an individual with a patent monetization past.

The same day that the February 2024 case that Avant Location Technologies LLC filed against Samsung was dismissed with prejudice, after a noticed settlement, the plaintiff filed a new complaint against Apple (2:24-cv-00757), asserting the same seven patents. Per Avant, “the Accused Products are Apple products that implement Find My, which include, but are not limited to, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple Watch, Mac, AirPods, AirTag, Apple Pencil, and Apple Vision Pro”. Litigation remains active against the other two defendants in this campaign: Generac (ecobee), which has yet to respond to a July 2023 complaint; and Fibar Group, which filed an answer on August 28, 2024.

Touchstream Technologies, Inc. (d/b/a Shodogg) has filed its first complaint in 2024 with a suit against Yamaha (2:24-cv-00739) in the Eastern District of Texas. The three asserted patents, each of which are asserted in litigation for the first time, are broadly directed to triggering the remote playback of content. Yamaha is accused of infringement through the provision of products incorporating its MusicCast streaming and multi-room audio system, along with the MusicCast Controller application. At issue is MusicCast functionality that allegedly “provides playback of content including from Internet-based streaming music services on individual devices as well as multi-room configurations”.

Daedalus Blue LLC has filed a District of Delaware complaint against Dropbox (1:24-cv-00998), alleging infringement of three former IBM patents through the provision of various products, including the Dropbox API, Magic Pocket storage system, and Nautilus search engine. At issue are features such as the support for file management and OAuth 2.0. The plaintiff pleads that the asserted patents have been licensed to “many companies”, including Amazon, Oracle, and Dropbox itself, but that “that license expired”.

Websock Global Strategies LLC (WGS) has expanded its sole litigation campaign with suits against ABLY Realtime, Adobe, Alchemy Insights, Apollo Graph, Autodesk, Discord, Ericsson (Vonage Holdings), NetApp, Postman, RingCentral, Rocket.Chat Technologies, ServiceNow, SignalWire, Twilio, Wallarm, and Zendesk, all in the District of Delaware. At issue in each complaint is a single patent generally related to symmetric communications between a browser and a server; the defendants are targeted over the support for the WebSocket protocol (as defined under IETF RFC 6455) in their various products and services.