Eureka Database Solutions, LLC, an entity associated with Texas monetization and advisory firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC, has kept alive its litigation campaign over patents from a portfolio picked up in September 2017 from Excalibur IP, LLC. The latest defendant is NICE (Nexidia) (6:20-cv-00197), accused of infringing three of those patents—generally related to annotating and searching multimedia data—through the provision of multimedia search tools, including Nexidia Audio Discovery, Nexidia Search, and Audiofinder. Excalibur IP is a subsidiary of Altaba Inc. (the company formerly known as Yahoo, Inc. prior to the sale of Yahoo!’s operating businesses to Verizon in 2017); its portfolio has seen several divestitures since late 2017, including to NPEs.

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.

In September, RPX noted the assignment of over 20 issued US patents from Altaba Inc. (f/k/a Yahoo! Inc.), through Excalibur IP, LLC, to Eureka Database Solutions, LLC, an affiliate of Monument Patent Holdings, LLC. Three of the patents from the largest family of those transacted patents, generally related to annotating and locating “items of interest” within multimedia data, have now been asserted in litigation: Eureka Database has filed separate lawsuits against Kaltura (1:17-cv-01529) and Panopto (1:17-cv-01530). At issue are the defendants’ video search features (Kaltura’s Video Discovery and Search and Panopto’s Smart Search).

RPX noted, among the patent transfer records released during the first half of September, a number of patent transactions that suggest that new litigation campaigns will soon follow. Assignees in this week’s report include affiliates of IP Valuation Partners LLC and Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, with assignors ranging from small operating companies to tech giants.