This week’s look at US patent assignments recently made public by the USPTO considers the movement of a networking portfolio to a New Mexico plaintiff that has already filed suit; the transfer of a portfolio from a shuttered Colorado-based software company that used to operate in the SSD space to a Delaware entity formed by its last CEO; and suggestions in a recent denial of a motion to compel from Eastern District of Texas Judge Rodney Gilstrap that the conduit of a pair of portfolios divested from an operating company has retained a financial interest in the outcome of subsequent litigation over one of them.

The earlier-announced divestiture of patents from Innolux to a well-established monetization operation has taken shape in assignment records recently made public. Those records also reflect the continued divestiture of patents, along established pathways, into hands that suggest that monetization may at some point be in the works. Meanwhile, another batch of US patent assets has moved in the other direction, from monetization operation to operating company.

RPX recently reported the transfer of nearly 200 patent assets from Singaporean entity IP Wave Pte. Ltd. to Cloud BYTE LLC, an entity formed in Delaware on February 22, 2024. Cloud BYTE has now begun litigating the received portfolio, accusing Dell (2:24-cv-00637) of infringing seven patents over a wide array of products, including certain networking products (i.e., ethernet switches, edge networking products, and SmartFabric services), Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) technology and related servers, and server systems supporting “high availability or fault tolerance features, abnormality detection, air flow cooling[,] and/or advanced temperature control”.

Three transfers of US patents recently recorded with the USPTO and made public—one from an optoelectronics company to an entity in a growing family of funded plaintiffs, one from an individual inventor who ended a litigation campaign last September, and one of former NEC assets passing through a Singaporean entity to a potential Delaware plaintiff—all bear watching over the coming months.