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.

Entropic Communications, LLC has filed separate Eastern District of Texas cases against Ubee Interactive (2:24-cv-00911) and Vantiva (f/k/a Technicolor) (2:24-cv-00912), targeting the provision of cable modems and gateways, with Vantiva further targeted over television set-top boxes, that “include or are based on the Broadcom BCM3390, BCM33843, or BCM3384 [systems-on-chip (SoCs)]”. The new cases have been assigned to District Judge Robert W. Schroeder III, but Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap presided over the earlier litigation in this district from Entropic, against Charter Communications. There, most recently, briefing has completed in an appeal that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed after the district court denial of its motion to intervene, following settlement, to seek the unsealing of the parties’ briefing (and evidence) regarding “a nationally important, precedent-setting case-dispositive defense”.

ERR Content IP LLC has filed suit in the Southern District of Texas against Comcast (4:24-cv-04385) over the provision of XFINITY Home. Asserted is the same patent—broadly directed to “providing a main content” on a first device and “extra content” synchronized to the main content on a second device—already in suit via August 2024 cases against Amazon, in the Western District of Texas, and against LG Electronics (LGE), in the Northern District of Texas. Per the claim chart attached to the ERR Content IP complaint, the identified first device here is a smartphone; the second device, a TV.

Earlier this year, RPX noted the transfer of eight US patents from DCX US Agility Platform LLC, a subsidiary of DXC Technology, to VideoLabs, Inc., which is in active litigation over earlier-collected patents, from multiple operating companies. Last month, portfolios of additional patents moving to VideoLabs appeared in publicly available USPTO records, from three new sources: OLogN Technologies AG (in May 2024), PRJ Holding Company LLC (in July), and ZING Communications Inc. (in July as well). Meanwhile, VideoLabs and its subsidiary VL Collective IP, LLC have sued Hisense, together with myriad subsidiaries (2:24-cv-00904), over the provision of streaming products (e.g., dongles, projectors, set-top boxes, and TVs) that support the H.264 compression standard and/or are compatible with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), including certain Roku-series software products.

Three Adeia Inc. subsidiaries—Adeia Guides Incorporated; Adeia Media Holdings LLC; and Adeia Technologies Incorporated—have together sued Disney (BAMTech, ESPN, Hulu) (1:24-cv-01231) over the provision of its various streaming services (i.e., Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, and Hulu Live) and related server products. At issue are features such as “chunking”, content delivery networks (CDNs), viewing progress tracking, and more, with six patents asserted in the District of Delaware complaint.

In a new Southern District of Florida complaint, T5.2 Ltd. has accused Cloud Software Group (Citrix Systems) (0:24-cv-62093) of infringing eight patents through the provision of various “Hypervisor, virtual application and virtual desktop infrastructure products” that allegedly offer certain “compression assistance, processing, and/or GPU-sharing functionality”. The inventor-controlled plaintiff pleads that T5 Labs, a British entity also run by Graham Clemie, owns the asserted patents and that it is “the exclusive licensee with all right, title, and interest in and to” them. T5.2 is the third plaintiff to sue as an exclusive licensee of patents held by T5 Labs.

Sandpiper CDN, LLC has filed an Eastern District of Texas suit against Comcast (2:24-cv-00886) over the provision of its products and services that use “Apache Traffic Control and any of Comcast’s bespoke CDN architecture or solutions”. Asserted are five patents, generally related to various aspects of content delivery networks, that the plaintiff received from Level 3 Communications in a series of 2024 transactions, only one of which is in suit against Alphabet (Google), in a Central District of California suit filed this past May. Google has knocked two of those patents out of the case with an Alice motion.

Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), through Intellectual Ventures I LLC and Intellectual Ventures II LLC, has filed an Eastern District of Texas case against American Airlines (4:24-cv-00980) and a Western District of Texas against Southwest Airlines (7:24-cv-00277), both asserting six patents of disparate origin. Three of those patents are already in suit in the Eastern District of Texas, against Comerica, JP Morgan Chase, and Liberty Mutual, pulling these complaints into an existing campaign that targets the use of Docker, Kafka, Kubernetes, and/or Spark. With these new cases, IV expands its infringement allegations to include the use of Hadoop, as well as the provision of Wi-Fi on board airplanes.

Last month, Touchstream Technologies, Inc. filed its first 2024 complaint, against Yamaha in the Eastern District of Texas; now, the plaintiff has hit VIZIO (8:24-cv-02328). Two patents (one familiar to the campaign, one new) generally related to triggering the remote playback of content are asserted, with infringement allegations focused on the provision of VIZIO’s WatchFree+ app “and associated SmartCast compatible devices, such as TVs, speakers, and sound bars”. Elsewhere in this campaign, Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright, while having denied other posttrial motions in a Touchstream case against Alphabet (Google), which produced a $340M jury verdict (and judgment) for the plaintiff, has yet to resolve a posttrial dispute over whether that award should be considered a one-time lump sum (Google’s position) or merely a royalty for an articulated period of past infringement (Touchstream’s). The court indicated in mid-January 2024 that it would “get an order out . . . pretty quickly”.

Brightcove (1:24-cv-01133) is the latest defendant to be added to the sole litigation campaign of OptiMorphix, Inc., launched in September 2023 with a suit against Alphabet (Google). In the new District of Delaware complaint, the plaintiff asserts 11 former Citrix patents broadly directed to various aspects of cache management and media playback. The defendant is accused of infringement through the provision of its various media platforms and services, with features such as adaptive bitrate management, audio-video bitrate allocation optimization, download rate management, and media coding at issue.