Liberty Peak Ventures, LLC (LPV), an entity associated with Texas monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC, has sued MasterCard (1:24-cv-20455) in the Southern District of Florida over products that “facilitate, maintain, transact, authenticate, validate, authorize, clear, settle, and/or process financial data, financial transactions, mobile payments, contactless payments, and/or online payments using Mastercard Transaction Instruments (e.g., Mastercard Cards) and related access to Mastercard’s payment products, methods, and/or services (e.g., solutions, systems, devices, networks, APIs, software development kits, and/or other product solutions)”. Since launching this litigation campaign in July 2021, the plaintiff has sued nine defendants—including Charles Schwab, Comerica, Fiserv, Regions Financial, Visa, and Zions Bancorporation (Amegy Bank National) and asserted 19 former American Express patents, ten in its latest complaint. At issue are features such as compliance with certain EMV standards, RFID technology, and tokenization.

Liberty Peak Ventures, LLC (LPV) has filed an Eastern District of Texas case against Fiserv (2:23-cv-00518), targeting the provision of a wide array of financial products with nine former American Express patents. The Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC plaintiff’s last active suit, against Visa, ended last month after the parties noticed a settlement. In a separate campaign (as a formal matter), the declaratory judgment action that Zoho filed against LPV in the Western District of Texas recently completed claim construction before District Judge Alan D. Albright.

Liberty Peak Ventures, LLC (LPV) and recent defendant Fifth Third Bank have filed a joint motion to dismiss with prejudice the Northern District of Texas case between them. The Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC plaintiff has nonetheless kept this campaign active by accusing Visa (1:23-cv-00716) of infringing nine patents, four of them appearing in litigation for the first time, the set of them broadly directed to various aspects of financial technologies, including account reconciliation, payment authorization, transaction authentication, wireless payments, and more. The Western District of Texas complaint targets the provision of a range of financial products that “facilitate, maintain, transact, authenticate, validate, reconcile, and process financial data, financial transactions, mobile payments, contactless payments, and online payments using Visa Cards and related access to Visa’s payment networks, APIs, software development kits, Visa DPS system, Visa DPS services and other product solutions licensed by Defendants to their licensees, issuers, acquirers, partners, and clients”.

Three plaintiffs associated with Texas monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC have added defendants to their existing campaigns. Liberty Peak Ventures, LLC (LPV) has sued Fifth Third Bank (3:23-cv-00611) over the provision of various financial products related to “internal payment processing, authentication, authorization, overdraft, enrollment, and fraud detection”. Monument Peak Ventures, LLC (MPV) has also sued Kyocera (2:23-cv-00127) over the provision of a wide array of products, including multifunctional printers, smartphones, tablets, and related software products, focusing on features related to battery management, image processing, and print management. Additionally, Redwood Technologies, LLC has hit Texas Instruments (2:23-cv-00135, 2:23-cv-00136) with two suits, targeting the provision of devices compliant with the IEEE 802.11ac/ax/n networking standards, mesh networking devices that are compliant with IEEE 802.11, and devices that are compliant with the Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) specification.

As recently reported by RPX in its Q4 in Review, NPE litigation targeting the Financial Services sector rose in 2021, with double the number of defendants added to litigation compared to 2020. The plaintiffs active in this sector today include several inventor-controlled NPEs, a publicly traded patent assertion entity, two Texas-based monetization firms, and multiple prolific litigants.

RPX data indicate that since 2016, NPEs have collectively launched over 80 separate litigation campaigns asserting patents received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). Meanwhile, the outflow of patents from IV persists, and divestments executed last year (primarily during the fourth quarter of 2019) continue to be recorded with the USPTO—many preceding the start of new NPE campaigns.

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.

Two new campaigns have arisen out of the recent large-portfolio acquisitions of Dominion Harbor Enterprises LLC. In an Eastern District of Texas complaint, Monument Peak Ventures, LLC (MPV) has tagged HMD Global (2:18-cv-00521) with three of its former Kodak patents over the provision of smartphones with dual rear cameras, as used to capture depth information and provide features like dynamic depth of field, as well as smartphones that disable certain camera features (e.g., the flash) when power is low. Meanwhile, Sovereign Peak Ventures, LLC (SPV) has filed its first litigation over patents originating with Panasonic, hitting Feit Electric (2:18-cv-10069). The accused products include LED light bulbs capable of adjusting their output to produce different colors and/or different temperatures of white light. MPV’s and SPV’s campaigns join prior litigation over former NEC patents by Dominion affiliate Vista Peak Ventures, LLC (VPV); Liberty Peak Ventures, LLC (LPV), the Dominion affiliate taking ownership of a former American Express portfolio, has yet to launch litigation.

Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC announced on March 5 that it has acquired from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) a portfolio of nearly 1,000 patent assets developed by American Express. A variety of Dominion affiliates, held through Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, have launched nearly 20 US litigation campaigns concerning a range of technologies over the past two years—including several campaigns asserting patents received from IV.