Acacia Research Corporation released its Q2 2020 financials on August 10, reporting decreased revenue but an increase in balance sheet cash since the close of Q1. The publicly traded NPE’s supply of patents is also growing. Having acquired at least four new patent portfolios so far this year, including from Marconi and L3Harris, Acacia now holds over 5,000 US patent assets, according to USPTO records.

RPX completed a number of deals in February 2020 on behalf of its patent risk management network. The acquisitions occurred within the following market sectors: E-Commerce and Software; Networking; and Semiconductors.

RPX announced on February 26, 2020 that it has secured license rights to Excalibur IP, LLC’s patent portfolio for a syndicate made up of a subset of the RPX membership, while also reserving rights for additional and future members. Excalibur IP is a subsidiary of Altaba Inc., the company formerly known as Yahoo, Inc. prior to the sale of Yahoo!’s operating businesses to Verizon in 2017. The global portfolio consists of more than 2,000 patents owned by Excalibur IP.

In connection with its liquidation and dissolution plan announced last year, Altaba Inc., the investment management company formerly known as Yahoo, has begun selling its remaining stake in Alibaba Holding. According to an SEC filing dated January 13, Altaba expects to complete the sale of all its holdings in Alibaba in the coming days. As of the publication date of this article, Altaba had sold 2,196,592 shares at an average price per share of $227.63, for total proceeds of roughly $500M.

In late August 2019, while IP Edge LLC dropped four brand new litigation campaigns through litigating entities Aristors Licensing LLC (over a patent received from an inventor-controlled entity), Enchanted IP LLC (over a patent received from Huawei), Sonohm Licensing LLC  (over patents received from Siemens), and Zyrcuits IP LLC (over a patent received from Linex Technologies, Inc.), the Texas monetization firm also added cases across an even broader set of its many campaigns. Altair Logix LLC, Digi Portal LLC, EncodiTech LLC, Saros Licensing LLC, and Wave Linx LLC—each a Texas plaintiff associated with IP Edge—have all filed cases over the past week.

Altaba Inc.’s liquidation and dissolution plan is now underway, and in a semi-annual report released on August 23, the investment management company formerly known as Yahoo said that it has begun monetizing its equity interests in Excalibur IP, LLC—the entity created to hold a portfolio of IP assets after Verizon acquired Yahoo’s core operating business in 2017. Meanwhile, Q2 saw patents from Excalibur’s portfolio continue to spread, as well as appear in new litigation.

The last couple of years have seen Texas monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC shift away from the acquisition of smaller families of patents from various sources toward the acquisition of large portfolios of assets—of former Kodak patents in March 2017, of former NEC patents in February 2018, and of former American Express patents in March 2018, all from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), as well as a large portfolio of assets acquired directly from Panasonic beginning in October 2018. Dominion (through subsidiaries of its litigation arm Monument Patent Holdings, LLC) has asserted patents from those large-portfolio acquisitions in litigation, and while it has continued litigating assets acquired prior to this strategy shift, that activity has dropped off. Assignment records recently made public by the USPTO suggest that, in addition, Dominion has begun to shed some of the smaller families that it had acquired under its earlier model.

Altaba Inc., the investment management company formerly known as Yahoo, announced on April 2 that its board has approved a plan for its liquidation and dissolution. If that plan is also approved by the company’s stockholders, Altaba will dispose of all its remaining shares in Alibaba and its equity interests in Excalibur IP, LLC—the entity created to hold a portfolio of IP assets after Verizon acquired Yahoo’s core operating business in 2017 (taking only a license to the IP left behind).

Excalibur IP, LLC has filed its first litigation over the former Yahoo patents that it holds, suing Spotify (1:19-cv-00165) in the District of Delaware. Four patents from three families are asserted, with the NPE targeting Spotify over its music service’s “fingerprinting” features, which identify audio data and match it to tracks in Spotify’s database and over the service’s personalized playlist features. These patents are not the first held by Excalibur IP to be litigated, however. In October 2017, Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC asserted assets acquired from Excalibur IP, and in June 2018, an affiliate of IP Edge LLC launched its own campaign over such patents.