Last week, Delaware District Judge Colm F. Connolly issued orders considering two magistrate recommendations: a first, agreeing that a case filed against Apple and Visa by inventor-controlled Universal Secure Registry LLC (USR) should not be transferred to the Northern District of California; and a second, disagreeing that a motion challenging the four patents at issue in that same case under Alice should be denied. In the latter, Judge Connolly ruled that the asserted claims are patent-ineligibly directed to the abstract idea of “the secure verification of a person’s identity”, ending the litigation. Though less consequential in light of that Alice ruling, litigants before Judge Connolly may still want to take note that the transfer denial order does reinforce an expansive reading of one of the relevant factors.

In October 2017, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against a variety of frequent litigants, including publicly traded NPEs Acacia Research Corporation and Xperi Corporation, as well as privately held Monument Patent Holdings, LLC and Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited. The Board also instituted trial in October for IPRs against multiple Acacia subsidiaries, Uniloc, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg. In addition, the PTAB issued an IPR final decision cancelling multiple claims from a data compression patent held by prolific plaintiff Realtime Data LLC, including the single claim that Riverbed Technology (one of the petitioners for the IPR) was found to infringe in a $4.3M verdict in May, with other final decisions issued in campaigns waged by TQ Delta LLC and publicly traded Quarterhill Inc. IPRs against IP Bridge, Inc. and Mobile Telecommunications Technologies, LLC also ended in termination in October after the patent owners requested adverse judgments.

Inventor-controlled Universal Secure Registry LLC (USR) has filed a single Delaware case alleging infringement of four patents (8,577,813; 8,856,539; 9,100,826; 9,530,137) by Apple and Visa (1:17-cv-00585). The patents-in-suit generally relate to processing secure financial transactions using mobile devices as “electronic wallets”. USR alleges infringement through the provision of Apple Pay, together with the payment processing network supplied by Visa.