Back in September 2018, MPH Technologies Oy filed suit against Apple in the Northern District of California, the local rules of which require litigants to disclose any nonparties having a financial interest in the outcome of the case. MPH Technologies certified that “there is no such interest to report”. A recent action that Apple filed in the District of Delaware seeking to enforce a subpoena to litigation funder Omni Bridgeway raises the question of whether that certification remains accurate. Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly recently transferred that Delaware action back to California, where Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse last week referred it to District Judge Trina L. Thompson, who is presiding over the MPH Technologies case itself, to determine whether it is related.

Publicly traded litigation finance firm Omni Bridgeway announced this week that it had completed the sale of a 25% interest in a portfolio of 15 IP investments to another litigation funder, GLS Capital. While this type of deal is not entirely novel—e.g., Gerchen Capital Partners raised a $750M fund focused on buying positions in existing legal investments—the Omni Bridgeway-GLS transaction is particularly notable in light of the funders’ prominent positions in the patent monetization space.

MPH Technologies Oy, a Finnish entity, has accused Apple (5:18-cv-05935) of infringing eight network security patents through the provision of a wide range of connected devices. More specifically, the Northern District of California complaint targets Apple’s provision of the end-to-end encryption used by iMessage and Facetime as incorporated into various products, including iPhones, iPads, iPods, Apple Watches, and Macs. MPH Technologies also targets Apple products’ VPN features (as offered by various “iPhones, iPads, iPods, and Mac computers”) due to the alleged inclusion of Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2) Mobility and Multihoming Protocol (MOBIKE) technology, respectively (and allegedly) used to authenticate VPN connections and allow VPN users “to move from one address to another without re-establishing all security associations with the VPN gateway”. Apple is further accused of infringement through its Always-On VPN technology, as provided for various “iOS devices, including iPhones and iPads, running iOS 8, iOS 9, iOS 10, and iOS 11”. This campaign is the second for MPH Technologies; in February 2010, the NPE asserted a ninth patent, not here at issue, in a single lawsuit against Check Point Software, NETGEAR, and ZyXEL.