Since taking the helm as USPTO Acting Director in January, Coke Morgan Stewart has played an especially active role for an interim agency leader in revamping how the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) handles discretionary denials. In February, Stewart withdrew guidance from her predecessor, Director Kathi Vidal, that limited the PTAB’s use of the NHK-Fintiv rule that governs such denials based on the status of parallel litigation, and in March took over the assessment of discretionary denial requests herself as part of a new two-stage institution process. Stewart has since closely scrutinized prior discretionary denial decisions made before that new process took effect, holding in mid-April that a PTAB panel was wrong to institute trial in an inter partes review (IPR) after a district judge had invalidated the challenged claims under Section 101. That decision has now been designated as “informative”, providing nonbinding guidance for future panels.

In a case filed by Cooperative Entertainment, Inc. against Alibaba, Northern District of California Magistrate Judge Lisa J. Cisneros has denied a motion for pro hac vice admission, construed as a motion for reconsideration given that the denial of a first such motion had been with prejudice, from William P. Ramey III of Ramey LLP. The court referred Ramey to the Court’s Standing Committee on Professional Conduct “to determine appropriate sanctions”. Despite expressing concern about the role of Jennifer Ishimoto (of Banie and Ishimoto LLP) in the case, Judge Cisneros declined to impose sanctions and “expects that her conduct at issue will not recur”.

Patent assignments recently made public by the USPTO suggest that Acacia Research Corporation has returned to a familiar well, possibly for more litigation; that an entity tied to a familiar patent pool is collecting assets from various sources; and that there may be simple logic behind the name of a fruity new entrant.

MOSAID Technologies Inc. has followed up its pair of 2025 complaints against Infineon Technologies with a new case filed against Intel (1:25-cv-00677) in the Western District of Texas. Against Intel, MOSAID asserts ten former TSMC patents and one former Panasonic patent, targeting the provision of various semiconductor devices (i.e., chipsets, FPGAs, GPUs, processors, and server products) with “active circuitry made using Intel FinFET Low Power (‘22FFL’), Intel 16, Intel 10 nm, Intel 7, Intel 4, and Intel 3 process nodes”, as well as devices (e.g., desktop computers and laptops) that incorporate such products—including those manufactured by entities identified as its “Authorized Distributors”, such as Dell.

In April 2024, Ericsson assigned 54 US patents to NovaCloud Licensing LLC. Now, just over a year later, the recipient has recorded security interests in the former Ericsson patents, one back to Ericsson itself, dated on April 8, 2025, and an April 18 one to NCLD1 LLC, an entity created in Delaware on March 26, 2025. While NCLD1 is of uncertain management and personnel, the correspondent for the interest transfer to NCLD1 is the cofounder of a prominent IP monetization backer.

In opposition to a motion for sanctions filed by a named inventor who now claims that a plaintiff that has been suing over a patent family since June 2020 never actually owned those patents, Carlos O. Gorrichategui, the apparent principal for a whole stable of Ramey-repped plaintiffs, has submitted another question-raising declaration. In it, Gorrichategui suggests that payments from past monetization efforts have been made to that inventor and/or to a controlled company, neither of which was ever disclosed as a party with a financial interest in the outcome of the plaintiff’s cases. This omission further suggests that this additional pattern and practice at Ramey LLP might be problematic.

Modena Navigation LLC has launched a litigation campaign, suing Honda (2:25-cv-00494), Hyundai and Kia (2:25-cv-00496), Nissan (2:25-cv-00495), and Toyota (2:25-cv-00492) in the Eastern District of Texas. Each defendant is accused of infringing the same four former MiTAC patents through the provision of vehicles that incorporate infotainment and navigation systems. At issue are features such as adjusting display modes based on the time of day, lane navigation, “navigation condition” monitoring, and real-time information tracking. Modena Navigation appears to be part of a spinoff from a familiar patent monetization operation.

1-800-Flowers (1:25-cv-00558) and Teradata (1:25-cv-00559) are the latest defendants to be added to the sole litigation campaign of DataCloud Technologies, LLC, an entity associated with Georgia monetization firm IPInvestments Group LLC. In the new District of Delaware complaints, the plaintiff asserts four patents—each received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV)—that are broadly directed to either file management or network communications. The defendants are accused of infringement through the provision and/or use of a wide array of products, including firewall services, mobile apps, website infrastructure.

Web3AI Technologies, LLC has begun litigating a single patent broadly directed to a “predictive compiler module configured to generate machine learning” with a suit against MicroStrategy (2:25-cv-00260) in the Eastern District of Virginia. MicroStrategy is accused of infringement through the provision of its virtual AI assistant “Auto” and related AI services—including the Auto Answers, Auto Narratives, and HyperIntelligence with Auto features—as implemented in its various software platforms (i.e., MicroStrategy AI and MicroStrategy ONE).

MessageLoud, Inc. has sued Apple (6:25-cv-00185) in the Western District of Texas and Samsung (2:25-cv-00486) in the Eastern District of Texas, each over five patents described by the plaintiff as generally related to “delivering and reading out loud text messages, emails, and/or messages from a messenger application to a user without any user input”. Infringement allegations target the provision of a wide array of products—including automotive software (i.e., Android Auto and CarPlay), earbuds and headphones, smart watches, smartphones, and tablets—that “support or enable features that read notifications aloud without user input”.