The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked District Judge William H. Alsup for permission to jump into the standing fight between Apple and subsidiaries of NPE Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited. Last year, Apple moved to dismiss multiple cases filed against it, arguing that after a May 2018 deal between Uniloc and Fortress Investment Group LLC, the plaintiffs lack standing to assert the patents-in-suit. The EFF, a self-described “donor-funded, non-profit civil liberties organization” with “more than 39,000 active members”, has now moved to intervene in those cases (3:18-cv-00360, 3:18-cv-00363, 3:18-cv-00572, 3:18-cv-00365) for a limited purpose: to oppose motions to file under seal the agreements that apparently apportion rights in the large portfolio of patents that Uniloc transferred to Fortress last May, as well as large parts of the parties’ briefs arguing about the legal consequences flowing from those agreements. EFF contends that those briefs’ heavy redactions, supported only by “rote justifications” in declarations filed by counsel for Uniloc, rob the public of its common law and First Amendment rights of access.

Yet more cases have been filed by Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited and Fortress Investment Group LLC, through controlled subsidiaries—six against Amazon (2:18-cv-00328, 2:18-cv-00329, 2:18-cv-00339, 2:18-cv-00340, 2:18-cv-00341, 2:18-cv-00342), and one against Microsoft (8:18-cv-01320). These filings follow a barrage of new cases filed the prior week against BlackBerry (four new cases), Huawei (one case), Samsung (one case), and ZTE (four cases), as well as against Amazon (four cases) and Microsoft (one case). Uniloc has now launched over 15 campaigns in 2018 alone, most of them asserting patents received this past January from publicly traded NPE Pendrell Corporation. In May 2018, Uniloc executed an assignment of nearly 600 US patents to Uniloc 2017 LLC, a Fortress subsidiary, according to a March 28, 2018 Asset Purchase Agreement, the terms of which have not been made public.

VLSI Technology LLC, an apparent affiliate of Fortress Investment Group LLC, has filed another case against Intel (1:18-cv-00966), this one in Delaware, asserting five more patents, of multiple subject matters and originating from either Freescale, NXP, SigmaTel, or VLSI Technology, Inc. The new suit follows an October 2017 complaint in the Northern District of California asserting eight patents against a large number of Intel microprocessors, including Core i3, i5, and i7; Xeon E3, E5, and E7; and Atom microprocessors, as well as Stratix 10 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and other products that incorporate Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (“EMIB”) technology. Now also accused of infringement are Intel products (1) containing Intel On-Chip System Fabric technology, (2) with a Power Control Unit (PCU) to compensate for Inverse Temperature Dependence “in an infringing manner”, (3) with metal dummy lines to reinforce regions under bond pads “in an infringing manner”, (4) that include an “infringing Management Engine” and a CPU that includes a memory controller, and (5) that supply an output supply voltage to a power gated circuit “in an infringing manner”.