District Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California has ruled on a motion questioning whether Uniloc Luxembourg S.a.r.l. (f/k/a Uniloc Luxembourg S.A.) and Uniloc USA, Inc., subsidiaries of Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited, had standing to sue at the time that they filed a raft of lawsuits against Apple in their original forum, the Eastern District of Texas. Judge Alsup ruled that the Uniloc plaintiffs did have standing, rejecting Apple’s argument that a purported “default” under a set of December 2014 agreements between Uniloc and Fortress Investment Group LLC, as subsequently and repeatedly amended, had shifted sufficient rights to Fortress to destroy Uniloc’s standing. Apple had also opposed a motion to add Uniloc 2017 LLC as a plaintiff, arguing that joining new patent owner Uniloc 2017 could not fix a lapse in standing caused by a May 2018 transfer of the Uniloc patent portfolio from Uniloc Luxembourg to Uniloc 2017. Judge Alsup ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, granting their motion to join Uniloc 2017.

For Uniloc 2017 LLC—the Fortress Investment Group LLC entity that took ownership of Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited’s patent portfolio last May—2019 has begun much as 2018 ended, with the NPE asserting those patents against various defendants across multiple litigation campaigns. January’s defendants include Bitmovin (1:19-cv-00179), Brightcove (1:19-cv-00180), Dailymotion (1:19-cv-00181), Sling TV (1:19-cv-00278), Telestream (1:19-cv-00182), and Wal-Mart (Vudu) (1:19-cv-00183), all sued as part of what might be called the “video streaming segment” of a campaign that has sprawled over more than two dozen defendants, with more than 15 patents asserted, since just last February. Uniloc 2017 has also filed two new suits against Microsoft (8:19-cv-00158, 8:19-cv-00196), one asserting a homegrown Uniloc patent (generally related to testing whether a remote device is secure) for the first time while the other concerns a patent (generally related to marking speaker changes in a videoconference application) already in suit against Alphabet (Google).

The May 2018 assignment of seemingly the entire patent portfolio of Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited to Fortress Investment Group LLC triggered a legal throw-down over standing in the cases that Uniloc had filed over some of those patents before their transfer, as well as the dismissal and refiling of the cases that Fortress brought after their transfer. Undeterred, Fortress—through controlled plaintiff and apparent patent owner Uniloc 2017 LLC—also continues to file new suits, over the past two weeks adding HTC and Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) to several campaigns already underway against smartphone and tablet manufacturers Apple, BlackBerry, Huawei, LG Electronics, and/or Samsung, and asserting two media distribution patents already at issue in cases previously filed against Walt Disney (ABC) and Hulu.

Fortress Investment Group LLC and Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited have added two additional patents to one of their existing litigation campaigns with new suits against AT&T (AT&T Mobility) (2:18-cv-00379) and Verizon (Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless) (2:18-cv-00380). The plaintiffs accuse AT&T of infringing a patent generally related to system control using a “wireless terminal” through the provision of the Smart Home Manager mobile app, as used to change settings for a home Wi-Fi network; Verizon, of infringing a patent broadly related to the delivery of data through “beacon devices” through the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) beacons in its retail stores, as used to send notifications to mobile devices running the Verizon app. The two complaints each assert additional patents already in suit in the campaign, all of them part of a large, January 2018 acquisition from Pendrell Corporation, with ownership moving to Fortress subsidiary Uniloc 2017 LLC this past May.