USPTO records reflect recent movement of a portfolio of over 100 US patent assets from Signal Trust for Wireless Innovation—formed in 2013 by InterDigital, Inc. to “monetize a patent portfolio primarily related to 3G cellular infrastructure”—to a Texas NPE that appears to be tied to Glocom, Inc.

Glocom, Inc. subsidiary SIPCO LLC has filed suit in the Eastern District of Texas against CommScope (Arris, Ruckus Wireless) (5:20-cv-00168) over the provision of Internet of Things (IoT) access points and gateways that use the ZigBee mesh networking standard as well as wireless access points that can send emergency notifications over cellular networks. The plaintiff asserts five patents in the complaint, managing to add two new ones to the group of now 30-plus patents-in-suit, in one of the longest-running campaigns, alive since 2005, one of those new patents recently sourced from Pantech.

An assignment from Pantech to SIPCO LLC—a Glocom, Inc. NPE that has hit roughly 80 defendants through its networking campaign—is among the patent transactions recently made public by the USPTO, as are assignments by Wuhan China Star Optoelectronics Technology Co. Ltd (CSOT) and TCL to a subsidiary of the patent monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC.

SIPCO LLC has added an April case against HP Enterprise (Aruba Networks) (1:20-cv-00537) to the two suits that it filed in March 2020, one against each of D-Link (8:20-cv-00595) and TP-Link (8:20-cv-00543). Aruba Networks is accused of infringing multiple patents through the provision of various networking products (e.g., access points, gateways, and mesh networking solutions) that use the Bluetooth 5 or Zigbee standards; D-Link and TP-Link, of infringing overlapping sets of patents through the provision of smart home routers, controllers, and sensors that use the Z-Wave or ZigBee mesh networking standards. This campaign has been running continuously since 2005, albeit with a change of ownership in the beginning of 2018.

On the heels of settlement in a case brought this past March against Dell, Modern Telecom Systems, LLC has added three cases to its campaign over a single, long-litigated patent characterized as a “learning sequence patent”, generally related to synchronization signals exchanged by network interfaces (in the past, dial-up modems) to learn how to communicate with one another. The new defendants are Barnes & Noble (1:17-cv-01725), Panasonic (1:17-cv-01724), and Sony (1:17-cv-01722). Modern Telecom’s complaints target a wide variety of Wi-Fi-enabled computing devices (in the latest complaints, certain phones, tablets, televisions and Blu-Ray players of Sony; still and video cameras and tablets of Panasonic, and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Tablet and NOOK Glowlight), alleging that operations compatible with particular Wi-Fi standards infringe.