RPX took note, among the USPTO assignment records made available during the first half of March, of the transfer of one set of patents to Fortress Investment Group LLC, after the NPE assignor’s default on a prior financing agreement. Fortress intervened in the campaign asserting some of those patents, bringing the litigation to a relatively rapid close. RPX also took notice of the transfer of patents from multiple assignors to another entity, Knapp Investment Company Limited, a British Virgin Islands entity that has never filed suit. The records made available in early March also contain transfers to frequent plaintiffs, including affiliates of patent monetization firms IP Valuation Partners LLC and Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, as well as Blackbird Tech LLC and Empire IP LLC.

NPEs affiliated with IP Valuation Partners LLC (IPVal) have filed the patent monetization firm’s fourth and fifth new litigation campaigns of 2017. Catonian IP Management, LLC has asserted two patents (8,799,468; 9,465,925), generally related to regulating access to a “service provider network”, against the subscription and pay-per-view services of cable providers Altice (Cequel Communications) (2:17-cv-00190) and Charter Communications (Time Warner Cable) (2:17-cv-00191). Two days earlier, IPVal affiliate FigureFun LLC filed a case (2:17-cv-00182) against LEGO Systems and Warner Bros International Television, asserting two patents (7,001,276; 7,338,377) generally related to a gaming server and a gaming token with a built-in chip, respectively. The accused product in FigureFun’s suit is the Lego Dimensions toy set, which contains a base that includes an RFID chip.