The last couple of years have seen Texas monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC shift away from the acquisition of smaller families of patents from various sources toward the acquisition of large portfolios of assets—of former Kodak patents in March 2017, of former NEC patents in February 2018, and of former American Express patents in March 2018, all from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), as well as a large portfolio of assets acquired directly from Panasonic beginning in October 2018. Dominion (through subsidiaries of its litigation arm Monument Patent Holdings, LLC) has asserted patents from those large-portfolio acquisitions in litigation, and while it has continued litigating assets acquired prior to this strategy shift, that activity has dropped off. Assignment records recently made public by the USPTO suggest that, in addition, Dominion has begun to shed some of the smaller families that it had acquired under its earlier model.

Four months after RPX noted the assignment of eight patents from Impact Sports Technologies to Health Watch, LLC, the latter has kicked off a litigation campaign, suing Huawei (2:18-cv-00209) and Samsung (2:18-cv-00210) in the Eastern District of Texas. Each new complaint asserts the same six patents from the eight received, all generally related to a real-time vital sign monitoring device. The defendants are accused of infringement through the manufacture and sale of smartwatches and smartphones that interact to provide health monitoring features. Health Watch’s new complaints allege that “[o]ther heart rate monitor products, before the innovations of Impact Sports, either required a chest belt, were not continuous, or were inaccurate or inconvenient during exercise or daily activities”, the following paragraphs of the pleading replete with references to the common specification for purported inventive aspects of the asserted patents’ claims.

The first week of January saw an assignment of a group of health monitoring patents to an affiliate of Monument Patent Holdings, LLC. Also in early January, Quarterhill Inc. announced that it has acquired a portfolio of semiconductor patents from Panasonic.