In a new Southern District of Florida complaint, T5.2 Ltd. has accused Cloud Software Group (Citrix Systems) (0:24-cv-62093) of infringing eight patents through the provision of various “Hypervisor, virtual application and virtual desktop infrastructure products” that allegedly offer certain “compression assistance, processing, and/or GPU-sharing functionality”. The inventor-controlled plaintiff pleads that T5 Labs, a British entity also run by Graham Clemie, owns the asserted patents and that it is “the exclusive licensee with all right, title, and interest in and to” them. T5.2 is the third plaintiff to sue as an exclusive licensee of patents held by T5 Labs.

Recently recorded patent assignments made public by the USPTO contain noteworthy transfers to multiple plaintiffs now in litigation, including a new source of patents for Apex Beam Technologies LLC, a new source of patents for Pantech Corporation, and a familiar source of patent rights for Crystal Leap Zrt, this time assigning patents directly, though. Movement can also be seen from troubled patent monetization firm IP Edge LLC, as well as movement from various sources to patent broker Allied Security Trust. Take a look.

Secure Wi-Fi LLC has launched its first litigation, suing Samsung (2:24-cv-00047) over support for the MAC randomization feature within Galaxy-series smartphones that include the Android 10 operating system or later. Three wireless networking patents are asserted in the new Eastern District of Texas complaint, the patents following a curious path into the plaintiff’s hands, hands that appear to be supported by third-party litigation funding from a new source.

A set of security interests executed last month, subsequently recorded and recently made public by the USPTO, has brought a new source of patent litigation funding into view. Six entities granted these interests to the same secured party, and three of those entities have already initiated litigation, suing defendants in the mobile communications and content distribution spaces.

Just a few years ago, the Federal Circuit was locked in a frenzied back-and-forth with Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright over his restrictive handling of convenience transfers. Starting in 2020, the court reversed him repeatedly on that issue in response to mandamus petitions, identifying a series of recurring legal errors in his substantive handling of the applicable transfer factors and faulting his tendency to sit on transfer motions for months on end. While that mandamus wave became a trickle by 2023 as Judge Albright began to adjust his approach, the Federal Circuit has continued to scrutinize his rulings on this issue—doubling down on its active posture last year with the apparent support of the Fifth Circuit. A recent pair of mandamus rulings applying that latest precedent against DoDots Licensing Solutions LLC—one granting Samsung’s request for a writ ordering transfer by Judge Albright to the Northern District of California, and the other denying the patent owner’s request to undo his transfer of a parallel case against Apple to the same venue—confirms that the Federal Circuit is still watching closely.

This past September, records made public by the USPTO revealed another batch of security interests in the patent portfolios separately held by six entities. Similar sets of security interests popped up last April, as well as late in 2021. After last week, of those 18 portfolios, 16 have now spawned litigation, over different subject matter, by various types of plaintiffs, all with ties back to the same apparent funder.

Earlier this year, the first case of DoDots Licensing Solutions LLC, filed back in January 2018 against Lenovo (Motorola Mobility), was dismissed from the District of Delaware after the court granted the plaintiff’s motion to lift a stay that had been imposed to await the outcome of three inter partes reviews (IPRs), one of each of the three asserted patents. The PTAB declined to cancel any of the claims challenged. Now, DoDots has turned those three patents on Apple (6:22-cv-00533) and Samsung (6:22-cv-00535), each sued alongside Best Buy, this time in Western District of Texas complaints.

Interactive Graphic Solutions LLC (IGS), as exclusive licensee of the asserted patents, has sued Microsoft (6:21-cv-00462) over the provision of operating systems supporting RemoteFX (e.g., Windows Server, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, etc.). The complaint targets certain RemoteFX features related to GPU-optimized Azure virtualization, full-motion video within virtualized applications, graphical compression, and remote GUI rendering. The development work for the family of eight asserted patents was conducted by their current owner T5 Labs (not named as a plaintiff), which has characterized the assets as fundamental to “cloud gaming”. IGS recounts a history of alleged interactions between T5 Labs founder Graham Clemie and the founder of Calista Technologies, a company that Microsoft later acquired.

Voice Control Vehicles, LLC (VCV), a subsidiary of Strategic Intellectual Solutions, LLC (SIS), has filed a fresh wave of cases in its sole litigation campaign, suing Esprit Model (6:19-cv-01816) in the Middle District of Florida and Best Choice Products (8:19-cv-01807), Contixo (8:19-cv-01808), and Yuneec (8:19-cv-01809) in the Central District of California. VCV asserts a single patent, generally related to a control system for a flying device, with infringement allegations focusing on radio transmitters (as to Esprit Model) and/or drones, used in combination with apps and a mobile device (as to the others). Prior cases in the campaign, begun in September 2018 with a suit against Alpha Group and subsequently hitting AWW Industries and DGL Group, World Trading 23, and MukkiM, have been dismissed within months of filing.

TMI Solutions LLC, an affiliate of Strategic Intellectual Solutions, LLC (SIS), has targeted a second group of retailers in its cookies campaign, after the two patents-in-suit—generally related to client-server communications—survived an Alice challenge in the first round. The NPE has tagged Barnes & Noble (1:19-cv-01229), CVS (1:19-cv-01230), Etsy (1:19-cv-01231), H&M (1:19-cv-01232), Hobby Lobby (1:19-cv-01233), Home Depot (1:19-cv-01234), Mary Kay (1:19-cv-01235), and OfficeMax (1:19-cv-01236) in the District of Delaware, where last September, District Judge Leonard P. Stark ruled, citing Berkheimer, that while the asserted patents’ claims are directed to an abstract idea (“exchanging information for the purpose of identification”), the first-round defendants failed to persuade the court, at least at the Rule 12 stage, that the claim limitations are “well-understood, routine, and conventional computer technology at the time of the invention”.