Last September, ThinkLogix, LLC filed its first case, suing Crestron Electronics (4:23-cv-00844) in the Eastern District of Texas over six patents from a portfolio of roughly 100 former Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) assets. In response, Crestron filed counterclaims that also named Ascend Innovation Management, LLC (AIM); Ascend IP, LLC; and Mind Fusion, LLC as parties to the litigation, Crestron pleading that the veteran IV figures behind these entities structured them “as part of a basically unfair device to achieve an inequitable result” and that ThinkLogix “does not have sufficient capital to operate its business, including patent maintenance fees and satisfying any liabilities that ThinkLogix may incur during litigation from adverse decisions”. The suit against Crestron ended in a dismissal with prejudice before any response from ThinkLogix—or from the other third-party counterclaim defendants. Last month, ThinkLogix moved on, suing VTech (6:24-cv-00206), this time in the Western District of Texas.

Crystal Mountain Communications, LLC has sued Coolpad Group (Yulong Computer Telecommunications Scientific) (4:24-cv-00308) and OnePlus (4:24-cv-00309) over a wide array of devices, including devices that utilize 4G modems or Wi-Fi, as well as smartphones and tablets that support “portable digital video player” and “geographic tracking” capabilities. In these new Eastern District of Texas complaints, the Ascend Innovation Management, LLC plaintiff asserts subsets of its portfolio of former Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) patents, subsets that overlap with those asserted in the cases that launched this campaign, filed against Diamond Creek Global (TP-Link Corporation) and TP-Link Technologies, D-Link, and Unizyx (Zyxel).

In addition to the announced divestiture of a large tranche of VoIP patents from Avaya to Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC, March 2024 saw several other operating companies—including DXC Technology, Huawei, and SOLiD—unload patent assets. Several NPE enterprises also moved patents around, internally or to other NPEs, seemingly in preparation for new assertion campaigns.

Byteweavr, LLC, an Ascend Innovation Management, LLC plaintiff, has filed its first litigation, suing Cloudera (1:24-cv-00261) in the Western District of Texas and Databricks (2:24-cv-00162) in the Eastern District of Texas over the provision of their various data management and analytics products, including the Cloudera Data Platform and Databricks Lakehouse platform, respectively. The asserted patents, of disparate origins, arrived indirectly in the plaintiff’s possession from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV).

Crystal Mountain Communications, LLC has filed its first litigation, suing Diamond Creek Global (TP-Link Corporation) and TP-Link Technologies (4:24-cv-00098), D-Link (4:24-cv-00099), and Unizyx (Zyxel) (4:24-cv-00100) in the Eastern District of Texas over devices, including access points, that include features such as support for Wi-Fi 6 and the incorporation of 5G modems. Three wireless communications—two developed by Nokia; one, at Defywire; and all three passing through Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV)—are asserted against each defendant.

Patent transfers recently made public by the USPTO include multiple assignments between NPEs, several of which have litigated previously received assets, but others of which are new and have yet to file suit. They also include a grant to the US Treasury Department of four assets, one of which was “litigated” through this past July, when Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright, on the court’s own motion, brought the campaign to an end.

The first litigation of Gamehancement LLC over former Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) patents transferred to it by Mind Fusion LLC earlier this year has been a barrage. The defendants—Accton Technology (Edgecore Networks) (2:23-cv-00569), Akamai Technologies (6:23-cv-00829), Analog Devices (2:23-cv-00566), Broadcom (6:23-cv-00839), Canva (6:23-cv-00840), Dropbox (6:23-cv-00830), Fortinet (2:23-cv-00570), Garmin (6:23-cv-00841), Infineon (6:23-cv-00843), INKA Entworks (2:23-cv-00572), Kenko Tokina (2:23-cv-00574), Kudelski (2:23-cv-00575), MediaTek (6:23-cv-00844), Ricoh (6:23-cv-00838), Siemens (6:23-cv-00831), and Sophos (2:23-cv-00580)—have each been sued in either the Eastern or Western District of Texas over a wide array of products, ranging from camera lenses to networking solutions.

Over the past week or so, two of five recently formed Texas entities with overlapping management have launched litigation in the Eastern District there: Accessify, LLC, suing Nikkei (Financial Times) (2:23-cv-00456) over “hardware, software, and functionality that allows users to use, access, view, and purchase digital content and information from the Financial Times website”; and ThinkLogix, LLC, suing Creston Electronics (4:23-cv-00844) over the provision of a wide array of products, ranging from multicamera systems to smart home solutions. In each case, the plaintiff asserts a bundle of more than five patents, assembled from a large portfolio of assets divested from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) this past February.

An entity created by two Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) alums has received more than 880 US patent assets from IV to date, and as reported by RPX last month, subsets of those patents have been on the move since at least June of this year. A review of USPTO assignment records confirms that even more transfers involving IV divestitures took place over the last few weeks, further spreading patents among a network of Texas NPEs.

RecepTrexx LLC has been expanding its litigation over six former Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) patents that the plaintiff received from Mind Fusion LLC in early April. Thus, while it has been clear for some time that at some point earlier this year IV moved a portfolio of patents to Mind Fusion, the size of that divestiture has been a little uncertain. The USPTO recently has made public two assignments from IV affiliates to Mind Fusion, both dated in mid-February, that combined bring the size of the deal into focus.