The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) continued to see the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against publicly traded NPEs in March 2017, including Acacia Research Corporation; Finjan Holdings, Inc.; Pendrell Corporation; TiVo Corporation (formerly known as Rovi Corporation); and Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). A variety of prolific, privately held NPEs were also targeted for IPR throughout March, including Blackbird Tech LLC, General Patent Corporation, IP Edge LLC, Realtime Data LLC, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg, along with several inventors and inventor-controlled NPEs and an assortment of other plaintiffs.

During the first half of April 2016, RPX saw eleven patent transfers to known NPEs recorded with the USPTO. One of those transactions involved a patent that has already been asserted in litigation against operating companies.

In the second half of July 2015, RPX saw 17 patent transfers to non-practicing entities recorded with the USPTO.

For the second half of March, RPX saw 19 transfers of patents recorded with the USPTO.

Round Rock Research sued Canon, JVC, and SanDisk for alleged infringement of a group of former Micron Technology patents. The defendants are accused of infringing five patents related to semiconductor fabrication techniques such as forming contacts and isolation trenches (5,986,347, 6,147,405, 6,358,801, 6,455,935, 6,828,683). Canon is accused of also infringing a sixth patent related to protocols for communicating with memory devices such as flash memory or DRAM (6,459,617). The accused products include digital cameras, video cameras, removable flash memory drives, embedded flash products, and solid state drives. These products incorporate chips manufactured by Ambarella, Macronix, Marvell, Mediatek, and Renesas, but those manufacturers are not named as defendants. This appears to be the first time the patents-in-suit have been litigated.