The earlier-announced divestiture of patents from Innolux to a well-established monetization operation has taken shape in assignment records recently made public. Those records also reflect the continued divestiture of patents, along established pathways, into hands that suggest that monetization may at some point be in the works. Meanwhile, another batch of US patent assets has moved in the other direction, from monetization operation to operating company.

One well-established monetization operation has announced the acquisition of a portfolio of patents from Innolux, while another is the recipient of yet another batch of patents assembled and divested from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV). Meanwhile, a newer monetization team has picked up a set of patents from an operating company in a move suggesting that litigation over the received assets is coming.

In a new complaint filed in the Central District of California against Dell (8:22-cv-02312), Longitude Licensing Limited pleads a series of attempts to engage third party Western Digital in licensing negotiations. After a related arbitration proceeding “was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds”, the plaintiff turned to Dell, Longitude Licensing indicating that it sent a September 2022 letter representing that its “normal approach” would be to “engage with, and license, suppliers such as Western Digital rather than their customers” but because “Western Digital has refused to engage in any licensing discussions”, it began “contacting Western Digital customers who are selling products that infringe Longitude patents”. The new complaint has now followed, Longitude alleging infringement of three patents through the provision of laptops and tablets that incorporate certain Western Digital-branded memory devices (i.e., solid state drives and memory chips).

Recent months have seen a number of patent divestments by operating companies made public, with a range of assignees including frequent filers, publicly traded patent assertion entities, third-party funded plaintiffs, and newly formed NPEs. Divestment size has also varied widely—from a single transacted patent to thousands.

Monterey Research, LLC has filed two additional suits against AMD (6:21-cv-00839, 6:21-cv-00840), one in each of the IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue) plaintiff’s litigation campaigns. The complaints target a wide spectrum of Athlon, EPYC, Radeon, Ryzen, and/or Zen-branded products, including various chipsets, integrated circuits, semiconductor devices, and more. These cases—the second and third filed by Monterey Research against AMD—follow a similar pair of suits filed against Broadcom earlier this summer.

The deadline for four Marvell entities to answer, or otherwise respond to, the Delaware complaint filed against them in January 2020 by Monterey Research, LLC, a subsidiary of IP advisory firm IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue), has been extended to May 19; however, late last week, Marvell perhaps previewed its response: in a Northern District of California complaint, Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.—the only domestic defendant (formed in California) named in Delaware—filed a complaint seeking declaratory judgments of noninfringement of the same five Monterey Research patents at issue in Delaware. The other three Marvell entities, two allegedly formed in Bermuda, the other in Singapore, do not appear as plaintiffs on the California complaint. Monterey Research’s campaign concerns a set of semiconductor patents developed by Cypress Semiconductor, with other cases active in Delaware against AMD, Nanya, STMicro, and Qualcomm.

STMicro (1:20-cv-00089) has become the fourth defendant in the first litigation campaign of Monterey Research, LLC, a subsidiary of IP advisory firm IPValue Management (d/b/a IPValue). Across the campaign, the plaintiff asserts subsets of patents, generally related to semiconductors (including chip architecture, memory devices, and fabrication), acquired from Cypress Semiconductor. The new case was filed in Delaware, where the earlier three suits—filed separately against AMD, Nanya, and Qualcomm last November—sit in different postures in the earliest stages, all before District Judge Colm F. Connolly.