In a burst of new filings, Honeyman Cipher Solutions LLC has sued six defendants across three districts: Adidas (1:20-cv-00401), ASICS Digital (1:20-cv-00402), Evernote (1:20-cv-00403), and PayPal (1:20-cv-00404) in the Western District of Texas; Asana (3:20-cv-00928) in the Northern District of Texas; and Slack (1:20-cv-01076) in the District of Colorado. As with its last complaints, filed separately in the District of Delaware against LogMeIn and Snap, infringement allegations focus on the defendants’ use of Apple’s iTunes Connect and Google’s Android Developer Console to register and distribute their iOS and Android apps. There is a history of challenges to those allegations.

Delaware plaintiff Honeyman Cipher Solutions LLC has expanded the litigation campaign that it launched in June with a single suit against Groupon, targeting that company’s use of Apple’s iTunes Connect and Google’s Android Developer Console to register and distribute its respective iOS and Android apps. Now, as Groupon challenges the sufficiency of Honeyman Cipher’s infringement allegations in that Northern District of Illinois case, the NPE has filed a pair of new complaints in Delaware against LogMeIn (1:19-cv-01545) and Snap (1:19-cv-01547) over their use of the same systems—laying out virtually the same arguments currently under fire by Groupon. A related set of arguments were also raised by Groupon in an unresolved motion to dismiss a Texas case brought by the patent-in-campaign’s prior owner, Bradley D. Liddle’s Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC (PET), before that case was dismissed for improper venue (thereby mooting the defendant’s allegations of noninfringement).

As predicted, Honeyman Cipher Solutions LLC has launched its first litigation campaign, asserting one of the patents previously litigated by Bradley D. Liddle’s Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC (PET). The new Northern District of Illinois complaint asserts a patent generally related to digital content protection in computer systems against Groupon (1:19-cv-03754) for a second time, again targeting the company over its use of Apple’s iTunes Connect and Google’s Android Developer Console to register and distribute its iOS and Android apps, respectively. In June 2017, a suit over the same patent, filed by PET in the Eastern District of Texas, was dismissed for improper venue a few months after the US Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision.

Multiple Delaware NPEs under the same apparent control have each taken over the litigation of patents—earlier passed to a Texas entity for assertion—after the patents have boomeranged back. Most recently, Circuit Ventures LLC assigned a family of circuit monitoring patents to Texas entity Wireless Monitoring Systems LLC, which asserted them in litigation from November 2016 to January 2019 before assigning the family back. Circuit Ventures has sued NXP Semiconductors (6:19-cv-00275) and Pepprl + Fuchs (4:19-cv-01515) in April 2019 and Honeywell (1:19-cv-00857), Link Interactive (1:19-cv-00856), and Scout Security (1:19-cv-00858) so far in May. Likewise, Universal Cipher LLC assigned a single patent generally related to “dynamic” text generation to Cumberland Systems, LLC, which asserted it in litigation from May 2017 to May 2018 before returning the patent to Universal Cipher, which has now sued Best Buy (2:19-cv-00160), Target (2:19-cv-00163), and Wal-Mart (2:19-cv-00164) over it. These reversals, as well as other assignment activity, suggest a return to Delaware for these and other NPEs affiliated with the same patent attorney, perhaps motivated by a recent Federal Circuit opinion clarifying that targets of letter-writing campaigns can seek declaratory judgments in their home districts, rather than risk being sued elsewhere.