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.

Commstech LLC has added a Central District of California case against Unizyx Holding (ZyXEL) (8:20-cv-00939) to the litigation campaign that the NPE began over roughly one year ago. The complaint again targets the provision of networking switches, including the Zyxel XGS3600 series switches, this time with just one of the six patents-in-campaign, received from Harris Corporation. Each of the cases filed has been short-lived, with the only other active suit filed against Fortinet in the Western District of Texas in mid-April.

USPTO records suggest that a Dallas-based law firm associated with a number of NPEs is gearing up to launch new litigation asserting patents received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). Meanwhile, the past couple of months have seen two NPEs managed by two of the firm’s partners add new defendants to litigation.

Commstech LLC has added HP Enterprise (HPE) (6:19-cv-00462) as a defendant in its sole litigation campaign to date, which has already seen cases filed this summer against Cisco (in May) and Allied Telesis and Juniper Networks (in July). The patents asserted in the campaign, including the three now in suit against HPE, are generally directed to network traffic management and memory management. At issue again is a long list of HPE networking products and software that incorporate the RFC 4607 specification “related to ‘Source-Specific Multicast for IP’” and/or that “operate with the ArubaOS-Switch software support ‘Quality of Service (QoS) prioritization’”.

Texas NPE Commstech LLC has followed up its Western District of Texas case against Cisco, filed in May 2019, with two July suits, one each against Allied Telesis (3:19-cv-04006), filed in the Northern District of California, and Juniper Networks (4:19-cv-00545), filed in the Eastern District of Texas. Three of the six patents asserted against Cisco, generally related to network traffic management and memory management, are at issue in the new complaints, with infringement allegations targeting networking products and related software. On July 26, Cisco filed an answer to the complaint against it.

Commstech LLC, a Texas entity under the management of Hao Ni of Ni, Wang and Massand PLLC, received a portfolio of nine US patents from Harris Corporation last fall. The NPE has now asserted six of those patents in a new Western District of Texas suit against Cisco (6:19-cv-00296). The patents generally relate to network traffic management and memory management, with infringement allegations focused on Cisco’s provision of router operating systems, certain network devices running them, and related products.