This year has seen the continued outflow of assets from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), including to NPEs, with IV at times retaining an economic interest in the assertion of its divestitures. Meanwhile, new NPE cases involving former IV assets continue to be filed in droves, and IV shows no signs of tightening up the spigot.

After a late summer hiatus, LF Capital Partners, LLC appears to have returned to litigating patents in the portfolio received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) last December 2018. The newest plaintiff is Piracy Protection LLC, which has filed two new Delaware complaints, the first against Panasonic, its subsidiary Sanyo, and Funai (1:19-cv-02046); and the second against Onkyo (Pioneer & Onkyo U.S.A. Corporation) (1:19-cv-02047). At issue in both complaints are Blu-Ray players, targeted over their support of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM) standard, including features that restrict the playback of decrypted content over certain types of A/V outputs that lack sufficient restrictions (e.g., analog and DVI).

Three affiliates of LF Capital Partners, LLC have launched litigation campaigns in the space of a month, each over patents received from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV) in December 2018. Computing Resource Technology LLC (CRT), a recently formed LF Capital affiliate, is the latest to do so; on June 28, the NPE sued Forbidden Technologies (d/b/a Blackbird) (1:19-cv-01237) over a single patent generally related to exchanging and manipulating multimedia files in a distributed computing environment. Blackbird is accused of infringement through the provision of its video platform, with CRT also calling out the inclusion of online video-editing software, FORscene.

In a new litigation campaign, Smart Locking Technologies LLC has sued Allegion (Schlage Lock Company) (1:19-cv-00994), Assa Abloy (August Home) (1:19-cv-00991), igloohome (1:19-cv-00992), and LockState (1:19-cv-00993) over two patents generally related to security devices. The recently formed NPE targets the defendants’ respective provision of the Schlage Encode Wi-Fi Deadbolt, August Smart Lock Pro, igloohome Smart Deadbolt, and OpenEdge Smart Lock—all smart locks that feature use of temporary access codes. The path that the asserted patents took into Smart Locking’s hands suggest that additional, affiliated campaigns may be coming.