Publicly traded Marathon Patent Group, Inc. has announced a settlement with Symantec, ending the company’s litigation against the NPE and several other defendants over alleged fraud and misrepresentations stemming from a 2012 patent monetization agreement. As Marathon recently disclosed in an SEC filing, the settlement was executed on March 8 and has led to the dismissal of litigation filed by Symantec in California state court against Marathon; IPNav and its founder and former CEO Erich Spangenberg; two other entities involved in the relevant transactions, Marathon’s Clouding Corp. and IPNav’s Clouding IP LLC; and Clouding IP’s manager, William J. Carter. The settlement also resolved a related Delaware District Court suit filed by Symantec against IPNav and Spangenberg alone.

A Delaware district judge ruled that Clouding IP lacks legal rights to assert on its own a group of Symantec patents and dismissed the NPE’s suits against 11 companies. Clouding, which is an IPNav subsidiary, was formerly named Stec IP; it changed its name in May 2012. That same month, Clouding initiated a campaign asserting a group of patents to which it purportedly held legal title pursuant to agreements with Symantec. The complaints alleged infringement of a total of 14 patents related to a range of technologies: computer hardware engineering and architecture, communication protocols and security, data indexing and storage, distributed and virtual computing, and network resource allocation and management. Two of the patents (6,925,481, 7,254,621), which relate to remote access to data, have been asserted by Clouding in more than 20 suits since 2012.