Four among the roughly 60 patents that Toshiba divested to Four Batons Wireless LLC in June 2021 have now appeared in litigation. In a new Eastern District of Texas complaint, Four Batons accuses Samsung (2:24-cv-000284) of infringing those mobile communications patents through the provision of products—with the Samsung Z Flip 5 smartphone identified as the exemplary accused product—that support dual concurrent Wi-Fi, multiple heterogeneous radio interfaces, the WPA3 security certification standard, and the Samsung Intelligent Wi-Fi feature.

Patent assignments executed in late 2022 and early 2023 continue to surface among USPTO data, with several transactions hinting at possible litigation campaigns to come. The assignees include a newly surfaced Atlantic IP Services Limited NPE, multiple NPEs apparently associated with a familiar figure in patent monetization, and an NPE that—according to public records—has received funding from a prominent litigation finance firm.

This past quarter, US patents continued to spread among NPEs, including to familiar faces in patent monetization, and while some of those recipients have yet to file any litigation, several did launch new campaigns during Q3, targeting players in the Networking market sector, wireless carriers, e-commerce or software companies, and device makers, among others.

Recent months have seen a number of patent divestments by operating companies made public, with a range of assignees including frequent filers, publicly traded patent assertion entities, third-party funded plaintiffs, and newly formed NPEs. Divestment size has also varied widely—from a single transacted patent to thousands.

Perhaps also worth watching in the wireless networking space is a set of two transactions, recorded with the USPTO on June 17, 2021 after their execution during the previous week. The original development work for the assets appears to have been conducted at Telcordia Technologies (f/k/a Bell Communications Research, Bellcore), a research and development operation established through the 1980s breakup of the Bell companies. The portfolio-of-interest has followed an apparent path from Ericsson to Toshiba, now into the current hands of a Delaware LLC.