A second Eastern District of Texas jury has weighed the damages appropriate to award plaintiffs Pantech Corporation and Pantech Wireless, LLC for the infringement, found by a first jury, of three standard essential patents ($739.7K) and one non-standard essential patent ($260.3K). The two figures come to exactly $1M, down from the $10.4M previously awarded. In mid-August 2024, District Judge Robert W. Schroeder III ordered a new trial after the first verdict, the court granting OnePlus judgment as a matter of law of no infringement of a fifth patent (not retried) and rejecting a request to impose a remittitur as to damages for the other four.

Add to the list of portfolio pickups by the same Korean monetization firm, which already includes batches of US patents from SKhynix and SOLiD, a set of assets more recently acquired from Suzhou Lekin Semiconductor Co. Ltd. (d/b/a LEKIN). Assignments recently made public by the USPTO also reveal bursts of activity from two monetization professionals, both suggesting possible strategy shifts going forward.

Recorded US patent assignments recently made public include several transfers of former operating company patents worth watching, including a transfer of more than 20 US assets into the hands of a newly-formed Delaware entity tied by an experienced monetization team that has run several litigation campaigns with the backing of third-party litigation funding; a transfer from the same source to another Delaware entity of uncertain management but possible connection to a prolific foreign monetization operation; and a transfer between two active NPEs of a couple of wireless communications patents received by one of them from an operating company back in April 2021. Those USPTO records also contain the divestiture of more than two dozen memory patents from an operating company and its acquired subsidiary to a recipient with suggestive ties.

Last month’s review of notable patent assignments considered the movement of assets from Avaya to Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC; from Level 3 Communications to Sandpiper CDN, LLC; from Seiko Epson to IPValue’s 138 East LCD Advancements Ltd. and Lumitek Display Technology Ltd.; from Transaction Security to a “BioCrypt Access”; from Fortress Investment Group LLC’s KIP Prod P1 LP to Prodea Automation LLC; from EMM Patents Ltd. to Empire IP LLC; from Siemens and Abdelsalam Helal to Rokiot USA LLC; and from Proxicom Wireless, LLC to Secure Communication Technologies, LLC. While a couple of these entities again feature prominently, this month’s review extends well beyond them to cover the movement of patents away from other operating companies, as well as within several repeat monetization players.

Publicly available USPTO assignment records indicate that MIMIRIP LLC, an Ideahub, Inc. plaintiff, picked up a large portfolio of assets from SKhynix in early March of this year. MIMIRIP has now filed two Eastern District of Texas complaints against Micron Technology (2:24-cv-00405, 2:24-cv-00407), both under seal, as well as a complaint before the International Trade Commission (ITC) (337-TA-3751). Proposed respondents include Dell, HP Enterprise (HPE), HP, Kingston Technology, Lenovo, and Tesla, with infringement allegations—with respect to a dozen of those former SKhynix patents—targeting Micron-manufactured DRAM and NAND memory devices, as well as devices containing them, “such as laptops, tablets, servers, solid-state drives, self-driving automotive computers, and automotive media control units”.

On April 1, 2024, an Eastern District of Texas jury returned a verdict in favor of plaintiffs Pantech Corporation and Pantech Wireless, LLC, awarding against OnePlus $7.41M for infringement of three standard essential patents (SEPs) and $2.85M for infringement of the other two wireless communications patents-in-suit. Two weeks earlier, the same two plaintiffs filed a second suit against OnePlus in the same district (5:24-cv-00038), there alleging infringement of eight additional patents through the provision of smartphones and other devices compliant with the LTE and/or 5G cellular networking standards. Meanwhile, in a separate Pantech case also before District Judge Robert W. Schroeder III, LG Electronics (LGE) has just filed a sealed motion to dismiss for lack of standing.

In July 2022, AX Wireless, LLC—a plaintiff formed in Texas but operating among the monetization programs of South Korea’s Ideahub, Inc. (d/b/a IDEAHUB)—sued Dell, HP, and Lenovo in separate Eastern District of Texas complaints, adding a case in the same district against Acer in February of last year. Asserted now are eight patents described by the plaintiff as “directed to wireless OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) networks and systems”, with infringement allegations targeting compliance with the Wi-Fi 6 networking standard. Ax Wireless pleaded ownership of the asserted patents, but briefing has just completed on HP’s motion to dismiss the case against it for lack of subject matter jurisdiction in which it argues that the plaintiff could not have received the patents from Applied Transform LLC in August 2021 because the plaintiff did not exist on that date.

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.

Recently recorded patent assignments made public by the USPTO contain noteworthy transfers to multiple plaintiffs now in litigation, including a new source of patents for Apex Beam Technologies LLC, a new source of patents for Pantech Corporation, and a familiar source of patent rights for Crystal Leap Zrt, this time assigning patents directly, though. Movement can also be seen from troubled patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC, as well as movement from various sources to patent broker Allied Security Trust. Take a look.

Last month, IoT Licensing, LLC sued Snap One (3:22-cv-00652) in the Western District of North Carolina, adding a second case to the litigation campaign that it began in the District of Massachusetts against Schneider Electric (1:22-cv-11358) this past August. In both suits, IoT Licensing targets, with the same two wireless communications patents, the provision of devices that support the Zigbee or Z-Wave wireless mesh networking standards: for Snap One, including controllers, dimmers, motion/contact sensors, thermostats, fan speed controllers, garage door modules, sirens, switches, and repeaters; and for Schneider Electric, certain EcoStruxure and SmartStruxure-series products, including controllers, switches, and relay antennas.