Semiconductor manufacturers are the newest target of a campaign by Innovatio IP Ventures. The entity filed suits against Marvell, MediaTek, and Realtek Semiconductor. There are 13 patents at issue in the litigation that relate to various aspects of wireless networking (5,740,366, 5,844,893, 6,374,311, 6,665,536, 6,697,415, 6,714,559, 7,013,138, 7,107,052, 7,457,646, 7,483,397, 7,710,907, 7,710,935, 7,916,747). A fourteenth patent, 5,546,397, is mentioned in the litigations but the complaints do not allege specific counts of infringement. Defendants’ Wi-Fi products and the chips in them are accused of infringement.

Cisco announced an agreement last week with Innovatio IP Ventures to license 85 million wireless devices for $2.7 million, or less than 3.2 cents per device. Cisco disclosed spending $13 million on the litigation that led up to this settlement. Cisco’s battle with Innovatio began in October 2012, when it joined Motorola and Netgear to intervene on behalf of customers accused by Innovatio of patent infringement. In response, Innovatio counter-sued Cisco, Motorola, Netgear, HP, and SonicWall for infringement of 17 wireless Internet patents (the same patents it asserted against the manufacturers’ customers). In October 2013, a federal court set a RAND rate of 9.56 cents for calculating any potential future damages in lnnovatio’s litigation against the five device manufacturers—a number dramatically lower than the rate of $3 to $37 requested by Innovatio.

Innovatio IP Ventures [NPE] filed suit against 10 retail businesses that provide wireless Internet access over 14 patents related to Wi-Fi networking. 3/8, 1:2011cv01638. The patents-in-suit were originally assigned to Broadcom and were transferred from Broadcom to Innovatio IP along with 14 additional patents on 2/28/2011, eight days before this suit was filed. RPX reviewed six of the patents-in-suit in October, 2010 as part of the Broadcom – Acq opportunity. The ask was $3MM. Salesforce notes indicate Broadcom “decided not to sell” at the end of November. Innovatio is represented by Niro, Haller and Niro.