The Federal Circuit has reversed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruling that cancelled three claims from a ContentGuard Holdings, Inc. digital rights management (DRM) patent, holding that the PTAB had incorrectly determined that the challenged patent qualified for covered business method (CBM) review. In a July 11 opinion, the court held for two CBM reviews filed by Apple and Google (CBM2015-00040, CBM2015-00160) that the Board had erred by ruling that the patent was a CBM patent because the claimed technology was “incidental to” or “complimentary to” a financial activity, a standard that the Federal Circuit had since rejected as overly broad in Unwired Planet v. Google.

Network-1 Technologies, Inc. has disclosed a 74.5-percent increase in revenue for 2016 due to license agreements signed throughout the fiscal year, also announcing that its net income increased by five times compared to 2015. Meanwhile, Pendrell Corporation reported its first year of operating income in 2016 as it prepares to de-list from Nasdaq, part of the NPE’s ongoing efforts to shift away from patent assertion in the wake of adverse jury verdicts in its ContentGuard DRM campaign.

In the first half of November 2015, RPX saw six patent transfers to NPEs recorded by the USPTO. Two of those recently recorded transactions involve patents that have been previously asserted in litigation against operating companies.

Google filed a complaint for declaratory judgment against ContentGuard, a subsidiary of Pendrell Corporation (4:14cv00498). The Google suit was filed in response to ContentGuard’s litigation campaign against makers of mobile handsets that use Google’s media applications. Google is seeking a declaratory judgment that its applications do not infringe ContentGuard’s digital rights patents (6,963,859, 7,523,072, 7,774,280, 8,001,053, 7,269,576, 8,370,956, 8,393,007, 7,225,160, 8,583,556).  ContentGuard sued device makers Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry, Motorola, and Samsung  in December 2013.  (2:14cv00061). 01/31, Northern District of California, 4:14cv00498

One year after ContentGuard, a subsidiary of Pendrell, filed its first litigation, the entity filed a new suit against Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry, Huawei, and Motorola Mobility. Nine patents related to rights management for digital content are asserted in the case (6,963,859; 7,225,160; 7,269,576; 7,523,072; 7,774,280; 8,001,053; 8,370,956; 8,393,007; 8,583,556). Four of the patents in suit were asserted in ContentGuard’s previous litigation against ZTE. That case, filed in February 2012, recently concluded when ContentGuard voluntarily dismissed the defendant without prejudice. In the current lawsuit, Amazon’s Kindle app is accusing of infringing the patents-in-suit based on its digital rights management solution. The other defendants are joined in the action because they provide access to the Kindle app on their mobile devices. ContentGuard was spun out of Xerox Parc in 2000 and then acquired by Pendrell in 2011.  12/18, Eastern District of Texas, 2:13cv01112