Early this year, a Southern District of New York jury returned a verdict in favor of individual inventor Michael Philip Kaufman and against Microsoft, awarding the plaintiff $7M in damages. In February, District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein entered judgment based on the verdict and has before him several posttrial motions, as well as Kaufman’s motion to amend the judgment to account for pre- and post-judgment interest. As the parties await rulings, Kaufman has filed a second suit, this time against Salesforce (1:20-cv-06879), also in the Southern District of New York. Asserted is the same patent from the Microsoft case, as well as a later-issuing family member, both generally related to client-side management of “arbitrarily” large databases.

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.