At the end of October, another Texas jury returned a $500M-plus verdict in favor of VirnetX Inc. against Apple. While 2020 has not been all roses for patent plaintiffs—recall that a few weeks earlier, Roku won a noninfringement verdict in litigation filed by inventor-controlled NPE MV3 Partners LLC in District Judge Alan D. Albright’s first patent jury trial since he took the bench—the most recent VirnetX verdict does join a string of high-dollar awards in patent infringement cases this year.

In April 2019, Kaifi, LLC, a Texas plaintiff associated with Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd., launched its Wi-Fi calling campaign with a single case accusing AT&T of infringing a patent generally directed to maintaining connectivity when a user moves from an inside to outside, with the same backend infrastructure managing the handoffs. That case ended in early August 2020 after District Judge Rodney Gilstrap handed down an April 2020 order construing multiple terms from the patent’s claims and while the court was in receipt of a large number of motions for summary judgment and to strike contentions and related expert opinions, as well as an earlier motion to dismiss for lack of standing—the related papers for nearly all of which were filed under seal. Kaifi has now reupped its campaign, accusing Deutsche Telekom (IBSV, Layer3 TV, MetroPCS, Theory Mobile, T-Mobile) (2:20-cv-00281) and Verizon (Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless) (2:20-cv-00280) of infringing the same patent in separate complaints, also filed in the Eastern District of Texas.

A jury in the Eastern District of Texas has issued an infringement verdict for a US-based subsidiary of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), a South Korean state-run research university. On June 15, the jury found that Samsung had infringed a single KAIST patent through the provision of semiconductor products utilizing FinFET technology, also finding GlobalFoundries and Qualcomm to infringe through the provision of chips and devices that incorporate FinFET architectures. The verdict included a finding of willfulness as to Samsung and awarded $400M in damages against that defendant.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) remained at the center of a heated public debate over the issue of tribal sovereign immunity in December 2017. Motions to dismiss filed by the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe in IPRs against several Allergan patents—acquired by the tribe and licensed back to their original owner to shield them through sovereign immunity—remain pending as the PTAB considers a wave of amicus briefs filed on both sides of the issue. The Board has since denied the tribe’s motion for an oral hearing on discovery related to alleged bias held by the USPTO and its leadership, and that bias’s effect on the selection of judges for the tribe’s case. Meanwhile, among the petitions for inter partes review (IPR) filed in December was one brought by Apple against MEC Resources, LLC, an entity owned by another Native American tribe, which took over an existing lawsuit asserting the challenged patent against Apple in the fall. Also in December, the Board issued institution decisions in petitions against Iridescent Networks, Inc.; Lone Star Silicon Innovations LLC; and publicly traded Quarterhill Inc.; while an IPR against Packet Intelligence LLC ended in an adverse judgment after petitioner Sandvine prevailed in a November trial.

The sole litigation campaign waged by South Korea’s SungKyunKwan University Research and Business Foundation (SKK) ground to a halt on May 3, when District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the asserted claim from the 3D sensor patent (7,957,639) at issue is invalid under Alice. In an order granting a motion to dismiss filed by LMI Technologies (3:16-cv-06966), Judge Chhabria held that claim 1 from the ‘639 patent fails the first step of Alice, as it is purportedly directed to a solution for “optimizing exposure on a structured-light 3D camera” but contains no information on an actual method for doing so beyond a description of prior art. The dismissal marks the putative end of the second campaign launched by a Korean university in the past few months, with another having been launched by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in January, and comes after ID Ventures, the venture capital arm of South Korea’s sovereign patent fund, Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. (ID), announced plans to expand beyond technology IP investment.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) continued to see the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against publicly traded NPEs in March 2017, including Acacia Research Corporation; Finjan Holdings, Inc.; Pendrell Corporation; TiVo Corporation (formerly known as Rovi Corporation); and Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). A variety of prolific, privately held NPEs were also targeted for IPR throughout March, including Blackbird Tech LLC, General Patent Corporation, IP Edge LLC, Realtime Data LLC, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg, along with several inventors and inventor-controlled NPEs and an assortment of other plaintiffs.

In the latter half of November, RPX saw recorded patent assignments to three NPEs that had already begun litigating the patents changing hands: Serenitiva LLC, an affiliate of IP Edge LLC, recorded receipt of a single patent with a colorful ownership history from Allied Security Trust; Robert A. Westerlund’s Strategic Intellectual Solutions, LLC recorded receipt of a single patent invalidated under Alice just days ago; and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recorded receipt of the patent that it has just asserted in its first ever US litigation. RPX also took note of two transfers to NPEs of patents not yet related to any litigation: Conversant Intellectual Property Management, Inc. recorded receipt of over 20 patents from Panasonic, while Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. recorded receipt of just two patents from Pantech. Finally, RPX saw two litigating NPEs each record receipt of another batch of patents from familiar hands, Mantis Messaging, Inc. from Post SMS Global Co. Inc. (f/k/a Mobile Messenger) and DiamondOp, LLC from United Module Corporation.

KAIST IP US LLC, a Texas entity formed in July 2016 apparently to assert at least one patent (6,885,055), has filed suit against Global Foundries, Samsung, and Qualcomm (2:16-cv-01314) in an effort to do just that. The ‘055 patent generally relates to the fabrication of certain double-gate FinFET devices. The new complaint alleges that the “pioneering” work of named inventor Jong-Ho Lee, IEEE fellow and now a “vice dean” of the College of Engineering and a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Seoul National University, allowed improved performance and lower consumption in a smaller area as compared to the more traditional use of purely planar transistors. The accused products are the defendants’ chips made using Samsung’s 14 nm FinFET process, as well as products (e.g. Samsung’s Galaxy mobile devices) that incorporate them.