In the second half of June 2016, RPX saw over 20 patent transfers to NPEs recorded with the USPTO. A number of those transactions involved patents that have been asserted in litigation against operating companies—some as recently as this past week.

Uniloc USA, Inc. and Uniloc Luxembourg S.A. have continued their spring filing spree with the start of a new campaign, asserting various combinations of five patents generally related to group voice messaging against eight defendants, including Apple (2:16-cv-00638), BlackBerry (2:16-cv-00639), Facebook (WhatsApp) (2:16-cv-00645), and Samsung (2:16-cv-00642). Each defendant is accused of infringement through their respective smartphone messaging apps. While Uniloc pleads that it is both the exclusive licensee and the owner by assignment of all asserted patents, the patents’ most recent recorded assignee is the prolific patent monetization firm Empire IP LLC.

Virtual Fleet Management, LLC (VFM) has filed affirmative infringement cases against Fleetilla (2:16-cv-00646) and US Fleet Tracking (2:16-cv-00647) in the Eastern District of Texas. The two defendants had each filed an earlier action seeking declaratory judgments of non-infringement and invalidity of a single patent (6,958,701), Fleetilla in March in Michigan (2:16-cv-11060) and US Fleet Tracking in April in Oklahoma (5:16-cv-00376). The ‘701 patent generally relates to detecting the approach of a specific vehicle or tracker, and the defendants are accused of infringement through provision of fleet tracking services.