Multiple Delaware NPEs under the same apparent control have each taken over the litigation of patents—earlier passed to a Texas entity for assertion—after the patents have boomeranged back. Most recently, Circuit Ventures LLC assigned a family of circuit monitoring patents to Texas entity Wireless Monitoring Systems LLC, which asserted them in litigation from November 2016 to January 2019 before assigning the family back. Circuit Ventures has sued NXP Semiconductors (6:19-cv-00275) and Pepprl + Fuchs (4:19-cv-01515) in April 2019 and Honeywell (1:19-cv-00857), Link Interactive (1:19-cv-00856), and Scout Security (1:19-cv-00858) so far in May. Likewise, Universal Cipher LLC assigned a single patent generally related to “dynamic” text generation to Cumberland Systems, LLC, which asserted it in litigation from May 2017 to May 2018 before returning the patent to Universal Cipher, which has now sued Best Buy (2:19-cv-00160), Target (2:19-cv-00163), and Wal-Mart (2:19-cv-00164) over it. These reversals, as well as other assignment activity, suggest a return to Delaware for these and other NPEs affiliated with the same patent attorney, perhaps motivated by a recent Federal Circuit opinion clarifying that targets of letter-writing campaigns can seek declaratory judgments in their home districts, rather than risk being sued elsewhere.

During the second half of September 2016, RPX took note of five patent transfers to NPEs. Assignees included Core Wireless Licensing S.a.r.l.; a recently created NPE controlled by the manager of St. Luke Technologies, LLC, Multiplayer Network Innovations, LLC, and Marking Object Virtualization Intelligence, LLC; and an NPE managed by the CEO and general counsel of Personal Audio LLC. One of the transferred patents has already been asserted in a litigation campaign initiated in late September by Listou Search Technologies LLC (a newly formed affiliate of Empire IP LLC), and what has become reliably predictable NPE behavior suggests that the remaining assignees will soon file new patent litigation involving other patents discussed in this report.