Having launched over a dozen new campaigns during the first half of 2020, public records indicate that IP Edge LLC continues to create new Texas NPEs—including at least 20 in the past three months alone. It also appears to have a full pipeline of patents poised for litigation, with USPTO records reflecting a number of patent assignments to various IP Edge affiliates recorded this month. Meanwhile, multiple recent internal transfers among IP Edge NPEs gave rise to new litigation filed this past week.

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

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) continued to see the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against publicly traded NPEs in March 2017, including Acacia Research Corporation; Finjan Holdings, Inc.; Pendrell Corporation; TiVo Corporation (formerly known as Rovi Corporation); and Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). A variety of prolific, privately held NPEs were also targeted for IPR throughout March, including Blackbird Tech LLC, General Patent Corporation, IP Edge LLC, Realtime Data LLC, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg, along with several inventors and inventor-controlled NPEs and an assortment of other plaintiffs.

For the sixth month in a row, a subsidiary of patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC has started a new litigation campaign. Kaldren LLC sued Citigroup (5:17-cv-00066), General Mills (5:17-cv-00067), J.D. Power and Associates (5:17-cv-00068), NeilMed Pharmaceuticals (5:17-cv-00069), Pioneer (5:17-cv-00070), Procter & Gamble (5:17-cv-00071), and SunTrust Banks (5:17-cv-00072), asserting a family of four patents (6,098,882; 6,176,427; 6,820,807; 8,281,999) generally related to encoding digital data in a machine-readable format. The new complaints target the use of QR codes in the defendants’ products and services.

During the first half of October 2016, RPX took note of five patent transfers to NPEs. Two of those NPEs, Forward Thinking Tracking LLC and Guada Technologies LLC, have already launched new campaigns asserting recently received patents, collectively filing nearly 30 cases so far this month.

Guada Technologies LLC (Guada Tech), an NPE apparently affiliated with IP Edge LLC, has started its first litigation campaign, asserting a single information processing patent (7,231,379) in a wave of lawsuits against 7Digital, Batanga, Defy Media, eMusic, iHeartMedia, Major League Baseball, Netflix, Pandora, Reliance Majestic Holdings, Rhapsody, Slacker, Smule, and Spotify. The defendants are each accused of infringement through the provision of keyword search features that allow users to locate music or video content across multiple categories (e.g., album and artist for music and genre and director for movies and TV).