Each of the Western District of Texas cases filed by Foothills IP LLC earlier this year was over by mid-August; the plaintiff has now hit two more defendants in the same district: Cloud Imperium Games (6:22-cv-01081) and Embracer Group (Gunfire Games) (6:22-cv-01082). Only one of the two patents-in-campaign is asserted in these new complaints, with Foothills IP again targeting computers allegedly outfitted with certain CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs, as used by the defendants “for commercial purposes, such as developing software such as gaming software”. Foothills IP received a much larger portfolio of former Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) assets, of which the two patents so far asserted are but a part, from Hanger Solutions, LLC in May 2020.

USPTO records confirm that a subset of the thousands of patent assets divested by Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) to a subsidiary of IP Investments Group LLC (d/b/a IPInvestments Group) have made their way to yet another NPE, Foothills IP, LLC, which recently kicked off its inaugural litigation campaign. With Foothills IP holding a large portfolio of former IV assets, including patents originating with major operating companies, more litigation from the NPE—formed by a familiar face in the IP space—appears imminent.

Foothills IP LLC has sued Aaron’s (6:21-cv-00450), Buddy’s Home Furnishings (6:21-cv-00451), Rubrik (6:21-cv-00471), and Tanium (6:21-cv-00477) in the Western District of Texas and Rent-A-Center (6:21-cv-00450) in the Eastern District of Texas over the use or sale of certain computer products—including Acer, ASUSTek, HP, Lenovo, and MSI-branded laptops—that incorporate various NVIDIA computing components (GeForce-series GPUs) and solutions (DGX-1). The two asserted patents, of disparate origins but both broadly directed to computer memory architecture, have expired, the plaintiff, itself formed by no stranger to patent monetization, having acquired them from the recipient of a large divestiture from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) last year.