Separate assignments of patent assets from five entities operating under the umbrella of Dublin-based patent monetization firm Atlantic IP Services Limited to a sixth such entity were recently recorded and made public by the USPTO. The transfers leave each of those divestors without any US patent holdings, at least according to currently available assignment records. Two Atlantic IP plaintiffs have notified the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the change in real party-in-interest in proceedings before it.

BlackBerry’s sale of 32,000 patent assets to a Key Patent Innovations Limited sub this month has dominated discussion around patent divestures to NPEs. However, in the background, a number of smaller transactions involving operating company patents have recently come to light, some notable by virtue of their new owner’s ties to third-party litigation funding. At least one of those transactions has already resulted in new NPE litigation.

Plaintiffs tied to monetization firm Atlantic IP Services Limited have launched multiple litigation campaigns with cases most often filed in the Western District of Texas. A frequent defendant, Apple, has responded with repeated motions to transfer, for convenience, to the Northern District of California, with various results: several remain in limbo before District Judge Alan D. Albright after the Federal Circuit issued a writ of mandamus requiring that the transfer motions be adjudicated before the end of discovery; another was stricken in its entirety as a discovery sanction; and other such motions have been granted—with a bit of an asterisk, that is, over extensive criticism of a repeat venue declarant. Most recently, Judge Albright has outright denied an Apple motion to transfer in one Atlantic IP-tied suit, and, in an order newly made public, transferred another of those cases—but not to the Northern District of California, as Apple had requested.

A paring down of claims-at-issue has been underway in the months leading up to the June 6, 2022 evidentiary hearing, planned in response to the International Trade Commission (ITC) complaint that Sonraí Memory Limited filed against respondents Amazon, Dell (EMC), Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), LG Electronics (LGE), and Samsung last August. Some of that paring down has come through Sonraí’s motions to drop certain claims from the investigation, but a May 6, 2022 initial determination granting-in-part the respondents’ motion for summary determination dismissed one of the three original patents from the investigation entirely. Sonraí anticipated this result, having gone back in February of this year to one of the sources for its patents to cure the problem and having filed this past week a separate complaint before the ITC that will restart litigation against the same set of respondents there as to the dismissed patent (337-TA-3621).

Atlantic IP Services Limited has begun litigating the former Siemens patents that it received from a Fortress Investment Group LLC vehicle this past October. The Dublin-based monetization firm’s Ollnova Technologies Limited has filed suit against Alphabet (Google) (6:22-cv-00246) in the Western District of Texas, Carrier (9:22-cv-80388) in the Southern District of Florida, and ecobee (2:22-cv-00072) in the Eastern District of Texas, targeting the respective provision of various smart home products (primarily thermostats) with overlapping subsets of five such former Siemens patents. With these suits, Ollnova joins eight other Atlantic IP entities to litigate former operating company assets, including Arigna Technology Limited, which recently added a case against TCL (6:22-cv-00217) to one of its many such campaigns, and Sonraí Memory Limited, which just hit AMD (6:22-cv-00229) with a former Atmel patent following additional lawsuits filed against existing defendants Amazon (6:22-cv-00225), Dell (6:22-cv-00188), Kingston Technology (6:22-cv-00192), LG Electronics (LGE) (6:22-cv-00187), and Samsung (6:22-cv-00189).

Sonraí Memory Limited has expanded its first litigation campaign, launched in February 2021 over patents received from either Microchip Technology or HP Enterprise (HPE), with a suit against Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) (6:22-cv-00029) in the Western District of Texas. The sole asserted patent generally relates to a system with a single-die, multiprocessor chip that runs multiple operating systems; Lenovo is targeted over the provision of smartphones “with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs containing at least one Hexagon DSP”.

Sonraí Memory Limited has added a Western District of Texas case against TI (6:21-cv-01066) to its litigation over patents received from either Microchip Technology or HP Enterprise (HPE). Only one patent—of the eight already in suit across two formal campaigns—is asserted against TI, the patent generally related to a system with a single-die, multiprocessor chip that runs multiple operating systems and Sonraí’s infringement allegations targeting the provision of products that incorporate TI’s AM572x processors.

Since February of this year, Irish NPE Sonraí Memory Limited has been litigating patents received from either Microchip Technology, as part of a 50-asset transfer in February 2020, or HP Enterprise, as part of a 17-asset transfer in June of last year. Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Oracle are already in suit, as are Apple, Dell, Kingston Technology, Kioxia, LG Electronics (LGE), Samsung, and Western Digital. Now, Sonraí has hit three of those defendants again—Amazon (6:21-cv-00991), Google (6:21-cv-01024), and Oracle (6:21-cv-01023)—all in the Western District of Texas and all over previously asserted patents. Infringement allegations across Sonraí’s cases implicate devices supplied by several other companies not named as parties to the litigation.

This past February, Sonraí Memory Limited launched two litigation campaigns, one comprising a single case against Oracle and the other expanding from suits against Alphabet (Google), LG Electronics (LGE), and Samsung to hit Apple, Dell, and Kioxia in April and then Kingston Technology and Western Digital in June. The Irish NPE, operating under the auspices of Atlantic IP Services Limited, a Dublin-based patent monetization firm, has now fired off an additional set of cases, accusing Amazon (6:21-cv-00787), Dell (6:21-cv-00788), Lenovo (6:21-cv-00790), LGE (6:21-cv-00791), Motorola Mobility (6:21-cv-00792), and Samsung (6:21-cv-00793) of infringing up to three patents, two generally related to peripheral device connections and one, to a certain circuit configuration.

Sonraí Memory Limited has sued Kingston Technology (8:21-cv-01039) and Western Digital (8:21-cv-01040) over the provision of devices that contain “SanDisk/Toshiba 64L 3D NAND flash chips”, as well as solid state drives (SSDs) that include Silicon Motion SSD controllers (Kingston) or Marvell SSD controllers (Western Digital). These new suits expand a campaign that started in February of this year with Western District of Texas cases against Alphabet (Google), LG Electronics (LGE), and Samsung and that proceeded with separate additional suits filed against Apple, Dell, and Kioxia in April, also in West Texas. The new litigation, by contrast, has been filed in the Central District of California.