Portal Communications, LLC, an affiliate of monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC, has filed suit against Microsoft (2:18-cv-00140), accusing the company of infringing three patents generally related to returning search results responsive to both spoken prompts and location information. The accused products are “mobile phones, fitness devices, tablets, and/or other computing devices” that use Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant for, among other things, “voice-searching”. This new case follows short-lived litigation of the same three patents, asserted against Apple in a case that was filed on March 8, 2018 and dismissed without prejudice five days later.

Just as Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC has announced the acquisition of a large portfolio of former American Express patents by an affiliate created in January, another affiliate, formed in Texas in April of last year, has begun filing litigation. In a new Eastern District of Texas complaint, Portal Communications, LLC has accused Apple (2:18-cv-00061) of infringing three patents generally related to returning search results responsive to both spoken prompts and location information. The Dominion plaintiff targets a long list of Apple computing devices “running iOS 3.1 or later and/or MacOS Sierra 10.12 or later”, including smartphones, smart watches, laptop computers, tablet computers, and desktop computers, as well as Apple TV, the HomePod, and certain iPod models.

Two of last year’s top five NPEs—Monument Patent Holdings, LLC and IP Valuation Partners LLC—collectively formed at least nine new NPEs in Texas in January. The former also picked up a family of patents during the month, as did a newly created Delaware NPE.

Roughly ten days after the US Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision on patent venue, Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, through the plaintiff, its subsidiary Visual Effect Innovations, LLC (VEI), and sole defendant NVIDIA filed a joint stipulation to transfer the case between them from the Eastern District of Texas to the Northern District of California. In January 2017, NVIDIA sought to a change of venue for convenience to the Northern District, explicitly reserving in its motion the right to contest the propriety of venue in Texas under any eventual TC Heartland decision. NVIDIA is a Delaware corporation headquartered in Santa Clara. The court has signed the joint stipulation, and the case has been transferred, formally under the provision of the venue statutes related to convenience transfers, to a new number (3:17-cv-03187) in the Northern District of California.