Patent transfers recently made public by the USPTO include multiple assignments between NPEs, several of which have litigated previously received assets, but others of which are new and have yet to file suit. They also include a grant to the US Treasury Department of four assets, one of which was “litigated” through this past July, when Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright, on the court’s own motion, brought the campaign to an end.

Wells Fargo (6:22-cv-00363) is the latest defendant to be sued in the litigation campaign launched by inventor-controlled Wepay Global Payments LLC in September 2021. The plaintiff asserts a single design patent, generally related to a design for a user interface, with the defendant accused of infringement through the provision of certain graphical user interface (GUI) elements in its mobile app.

From last September through early January, Wepay Global Payments LLC sued five companies over alleged infringement of a single design patent generally related to “a display screen portion with animated graphical user interface”. Now, a new such design patent having just issued, FinTech Innovation Associates LLC has hit the same five defendants: Bank of America (1:22-cv-01215), JPMorgan Chase (1:22-cv-01216), PayPal (1:22-cv-01212), PNC Bank (1:22-cv-01214), and Samsung (1:22-cv-01213). Again targeted are payment screens featuring QR codes and purchase amounts. FinTech and Wepay are tied to the same figure, who, per PNC Bank’s recent motion to dismiss in the Wepay campaign, “either in his personal capacity or on behalf of organizations, has filed at least 86 intellectual property infringement actions”, none of which “involved an assertion that has proven to be meritorious”.

Wepay Global Payments LLC has added Northern District of Illinois cases against Amazon (1:22-cv-01061), McDonald’s (1:22-cv-01064), and Walmart (1:22-cv-01062) and Western District of Texas suits against Apple (6:22-cv-00223) and Tesla (6:22-cv-00224) to the design patent campaign that it began last October. Wepay asserts a single (presumably) design patent, generally related to “display screen portion with animated graphical user interface”, although a set of “typos” appears to introduce a second design patent that currently available USPTO records suggest Wepay does not own. However that shakes out, the case against Apple has already been dismissed, with prejudice, just two days after its filing.

Inventor-controlled Wepay Global Payments LLC has expanded the campaign that it launched in September 2021, suing Bank of America (1:22-cv-00105) and JPMorgan Chase (1:22-cv-00103), both in the Northern District of Illinois. The plaintiff asserts a single design patent, generally related to a particular user interface, with the defendants accused of infringement through the provision of mobile apps that feature certain graphical user interface (GUI) elements.

As recently reported by RPX in its Q4 in Review, NPE litigation targeting the Financial Services sector rose in 2021, with double the number of defendants added to litigation compared to 2020. The plaintiffs active in this sector today include several inventor-controlled NPEs, a publicly traded patent assertion entity, two Texas-based monetization firms, and multiple prolific litigants.

As recently reported in RPX’s Q1 in Review, NPE litigation targeting the Financial Services sector jumped by 111% during the first quarter of 2021. That Q1 wave of Financial Services litigation was filed by a variety of NPE plaintiffs, including several inventor-controlled entities; an NPE associated with the monetization firm Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP); and an affiliate of prolific filer IP Edge LLC.

Since December 2013, William Grecia has been continuously litigating a three-member family of patents on which he is the named inventor. The campaign has hit dozens of defendants, including providers of streaming services (e.g., Amazon, Cablevision, Sony, WalMart (VUDU)), makers of software with encrypted cloud storage (e.g., Adobe) and devices with cloud settings (e.g., Apple, Google), and companies offering or using payment systems (e.g., American Express, Best Buy, Target). Despite a Federal Circuit setback at the outset of the year, Grecia has continued asserting one of the three patents in 2021, accusing Cullen/Frost Bankers (6:21-cv-00016), Kohl’s (6:21-cv-00102), and Samsung (Samsung Austin Semiconductor) (6:21-cv-00131) of infringement in Western District of Texas complaints, the last case filed one day after Samsung asked the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for declaratory judgments of both noninfringement and invalidity (2:21-cv-00562).

Inventor William Grecia has followed up a November 2018 wave of lawsuits against carriers Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), SoftBank (Sprint), and Verizon over their provision of Samsung Galaxy phones using Samsung Pay, with a new wave of cases against financial institutions. Bank of New York Mellon (1:19-cv-02810), Citibank (1:19-cv-02811), Morgan Stanley (1:19-cv-02811), and TIAA Bank (1:19-cv-02812) are each accused of infringing a single Grecia patent broadly directed to user authentication for digital content stored in a cloud; at issue are payment transfer services using the Zelle digital payments network, which was founded by a group of US financial institutions.

Inventor William Grecia has continued to expand his cloud authentication campaign with the filing of seven new lawsuits, accusing Adobe (3:16-cv-06283), Big Ten Network Services (1:16-cv-10211), Cablevision (1:16-cv-10213), Fox (1:16-cv-10216), the National Football League (NFL Network Services) (1:16-cv-10221), STARZ (1:16-cv-10222), and Target (1:16-cv-10267) of infringing multiple combinations of two patents (8,402,555; 8,533,860) generally related to user authentication for digital content stored in a cloud. Nearly all of these latest defendants are alleged to infringe through the provision of “TV Anywhere” video streaming services, with two exceptions: Adobe is accused of infringing the ‘555 and ‘860 patents through the encrypted cloud storage features of its Creative Cloud software suite, while Target is alleged to infringe the ‘860 patent alone through the use of the EMV standard (used for chip-based credit cards) in its point-of-sale systems.