This past April, publicly traded Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC) bought more than 2,500 US patents, as well as foreign counterparts and applications, for $9M from Monterey Research, LLC. Monterey Research, an IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) plaintiff, then moved to dismiss—for lack of standing—its existing cases. Defendants DENSO and Renesas Electronics have opposed, pointing to, among other things, Monterey’s ongoing financial interest in any litigation by the new patentholder, QPRC subsidiary MR Licensing LLC. They ask the Eastern District of Texas as well as the Northern District of California simply to substitute MR Licensing in for Monterey. Each court has yet to rule.

USPTO assignments recently made public reveal the divestiture of former Cypress Semiconductor patents before Monterey Research, LLC sold the rest to Quest Patent Research Corporation. Those records also reflect a bit of a whirlwind of activity from Erich Spangenberg’s SIM IP, that activity now involving plenty of action in one center of gravity for patent litigation: Texas. Finally, a new Delaware entity has acquired some former assets of a “collaboration AI” operation.

Earlier this month, publicly traded Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC) purchased more than 2,500 US patents, as well as foreign counterparts and applications, for $9M from Monterey Research, LLC. The subsidiary receiving those assets, MR Licensing LLC, has filed its first suit, in which it accuses DENSO and Renesas Electronics (2:25-cv-00441) of infringing eight of the patents through the provision of a long list of accused products. QPRC’s recent SEC filing describes the portfolio as related to “storage device security and semiconductor circuitry”, indicating that the financing for the deal includes “up to $7,500,000 for patent enforcement costs, including legal fees subject to budget limitation to be agreed upon”. Monterey Research sued the same two defendants over four of the patents appearing in MR Licensing’s new complaint last year; word on the docket of that case concerning this change of ownership has yet to appear, beyond entries of appearance by MR Licensing counsel Fabricant LLP.

Monterey Research, LLC has brought four more patents into the litigation campaign that it began back in November 2019. It has done so through a new Eastern District of Texas suit filed against both DENSO and Renesas Electronics (2:24-cv-00238), DENSO as the alleged customer of the wide array of accused semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, including certain embedded flash memory devices, as well as microcontrollers. Past defendants in this campaign include AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, and Qualcomm, as well as Nanya Technology and STMicro, the cases against which are on the verge of closure after extensive activity before the USPTO over the patents asserted there.

Heritage IP LLC and Mallard IP LLC, both plaintiffs apparently associated with Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, filed suits at the end of July, continuing their joint campaign over former Cypress Semiconductor patents. Heritage IP sued Rand McNally (RM Acquisition) (1:22-cv-01019) and ZiLOG (1:22-cv-01020) over the provision of devices that incorporate certain ARM Cortex M0-based microcontrollers with dynamic power management capabilities, including logging devices and microcontrollers, respectively. Mallard IP hit Advantech (1:22-cv-03959) over the provision of the DS-082 Player and Fujitsu (2:22-cv-00289) over the provision of the PRIMERGY GX2460 server, each of which incorporates DDR4 SDRAM.

Monterey Research, LLC has filed two additional suits against AMD (6:21-cv-00839, 6:21-cv-00840), one in each of the IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) plaintiff’s litigation campaigns. The complaints target a wide spectrum of Athlon, EPYC, Radeon, Ryzen, and/or Zen-branded products, including various chipsets, integrated circuits, semiconductor devices, and more. These cases—the second and third filed by Monterey Research against AMD—follow a similar pair of suits filed against Broadcom earlier this summer.

Monterey Research, LLC, a plaintiff associated with Vector Capital’s IPValue Management, Inc. (d/b/a IPValue), has filed two lawsuits against Broadcom (6:21-cv-00541, 6:21-cv-00542). The NPE asserts a total of ten semiconductor and memory patents across the two complaints. The new litigation—filed in the Western District of Texas this time—arrives as multiple 2021 orders have stayed some, but not all, of the NPE’s previous cases in the District of Delaware in light of several inter partes reviews (IPRs) underway before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). A wide spectrum of Broadcom chips and related products are targeted in the new suits.

As extensively reported by RPX, the acquisition and assertion of operating company patents by NPEs remained a significant driver of litigation throughout 2020. Be prepared for this long-term trend to possibly accelerate as a result of the COVID-19 recession. If past is prologue, the current financial crisis will likely be followed by years of increased patent divestments by operating companies—including to NPEs.

The deadline for four Marvell entities to answer, or otherwise respond to, the Delaware complaint filed against them in January 2020 by Monterey Research, LLC, a subsidiary of IP advisory firm IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue), has been extended to May 19; however, late last week, Marvell perhaps previewed its response: in a Northern District of California complaint, Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.—the only domestic defendant (formed in California) named in Delaware—filed a complaint seeking declaratory judgments of noninfringement of the same five Monterey Research patents at issue in Delaware. The other three Marvell entities, two allegedly formed in Bermuda, the other in Singapore, do not appear as plaintiffs on the California complaint. Monterey Research’s campaign concerns a set of semiconductor patents developed by Cypress Semiconductor, with other cases active in Delaware against AMD, Nanya, STMicro, and Qualcomm.

Late 2019/early 2020 saw prolific NPE IP Edge LLC—which has filed over 100 new patent cases since the start of this year—acquire patent portfolios from a variety of sources, including Huawei; a litigating subsidiary of IP Value Management (d/b/a IPValue); and a subsidiary of Allied Inventors Management, LLC. The transactions discussed in this article have placed in IP Edge’s hands assets originating with AMD, Cypress Semiconductor, Fujitsu, and Huawei, among others—some of which it has already begun litigating.