On May 10, 2024, Orange (f/k/a France Telecom) assigned five US patents to IP monetization firm Transpacific IP Group Limited. This divestiture echoes a fateful acquisition by Transpacific IP from Orange back in 2017—an acquisition that led to a failed deal with monetization shop Slingshot Technologies LLC, a completed deal with publicly traded Acacia Research Corporation, a litigation campaign from Acacia’s Monarch Networking Solutions LLC that remains active today, and Delaware state court litigation between Slingshot and Acacia that has persisted in parallel, through the present day. In June 2024, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis denied Acacia’s motion for summary judgment in its entirety, with the presence of a prominent figure in litigation funding on Acacia’s board figuring in the disputed factual predicate for Slingshot’s persistent trade secret misappropriation and companion tort claims.

Acacia Research Corporation released its second quarter financials on August 16, reporting higher year-over-year licensing revenue and a number of settlements across multiple enforcement campaigns. While Acacia has completed fewer patent acquisitions so far this year (as compared to the six months ended June 30, 2020), a Q2 transaction has already given way to a new litigation campaign, begun earlier this month.

Some of the former intellectual property assets of Aliph (d/b/a Jawbone), a maker of Bluetooth headsets and other audio accessories that was liquidated in 2017—75 of them—have landed in litigation. The current owner, Jawbone Innovations, LLC, has sued Samsung (2:21-cv-00186) over the provision of products with voice activity detection features and related microphone arrays, including earbuds and smartphones. The complaint specifically highlights the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro and Galaxy S20 as products accused of infringing the two asserted patents.

Gravel Rating Systems LLC has filed two more cases, suing Broadcom (4:21-cv-00329) and Dish Wireless d/b/a Boost Mobile (4:21-cv-00328), both in the Eastern District of Texas, over their e-commerce websites. The plaintiff pleads that the asserted patent “resulted from the pioneering efforts of” its named inventors “in the area of a network-based knowledge sharing system and interface that allows every member of a knowledge sharing group to benefit from aggregate knowledge, experience and opinions of other members of the group”.

Quartz Auto Technologies, LLC has expanded its sole litigation campaign with a new suit against Postmates (1:20-cv-01673)—acquired by Uber earlier this month—in the District of Delaware. The three asserted patents, originating with IBM, generally relate to various aspects of location-based functionality, with the plaintiff’s infringement allegations targeting the Postmates platform (including the Fleet app) over features for “coordinating, controlling, and providing on-demand delivery services” through location data. The new case joins two active February 2020 suits, filed in the Western District of Texas, against Lyft and Uber.

Last week RPX reported the assignment of the remaining former IBM assets acquired last fall by Daedalus Group LLC to new Maryland entity Slingshot IOT LLC. Most of those assets were transferred in late January to Daedalus Blue LLC, a entity that has subsequently begun asserting a subset of them, filing a case against dronemaker DJI. Last week, Slingshot IOT assigned nearly 20 assets, roughly a third of what it received from Daedalus Group, to Quartz Auto Technologies, LLC, another new Maryland entity, which has also now turned plaintiff, suing Uber (6:20-cv-00126) in the Western District of Texas over six of those patents.

The USPTO recently made public a transaction between Intellectual Ventures LLC and Slingshot Technologies LLC, an entity with ties to the similarly named NPE Slingshot Printing LLC, which has an ongoing campaign asserting former Lexmark International patents (and which this past week filed its fourth suit against HP). While Slingshot Technologies has not filed any litigation as of the publication date of this report, the recent recording of its acquisition from IV—which comprised assignments in late 2018 and early 2019, involving over 20 US assets of disparate origins—suggests that the launch of its inaugural campaign may be imminent.