The last couple of years have seen Texas monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC shift away from the acquisition of smaller families of patents from various sources toward the acquisition of large portfolios of assets—of former Kodak patents in March 2017, of former NEC patents in February 2018, and of former American Express patents in March 2018, all from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), as well as a large portfolio of assets acquired directly from Panasonic beginning in October 2018. Dominion (through subsidiaries of its litigation arm Monument Patent Holdings, LLC) has asserted patents from those large-portfolio acquisitions in litigation, and while it has continued litigating assets acquired prior to this strategy shift, that activity has dropped off. Assignment records recently made public by the USPTO suggest that, in addition, Dominion has begun to shed some of the smaller families that it had acquired under its earlier model.

Mobile Networking Solutions, LLC (MNS) has kicked off a campaign asserting patents that have been previously litigated by Parallel Iron LLC (a subsidiary of IP Navigation Group, LLC d/b/a IPNav) against nearly 50 defendants. MNS, which is managed by Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, sued Experian and MapR Technologies on May 19, alleging infringement of three physical computer storage patents (7,197,662; 7,543,177; 7,958,388) through Experian’s data storage systems based on the MapR Distribution including Hadoop (8:17-cv-00884).

RPX took note, among the USPTO assignment records made available during the first half of March, of the transfer of one set of patents to Fortress Investment Group LLC, after the NPE assignor’s default on a prior financing agreement. Fortress intervened in the campaign asserting some of those patents, bringing the litigation to a relatively rapid close. RPX also took notice of the transfer of patents from multiple assignors to another entity, Knapp Investment Company Limited, a British Virgin Islands entity that has never filed suit. The records made available in early March also contain transfers to frequent plaintiffs, including affiliates of patent monetization firms IP Valuation Partners LLC and Monument Patent Holdings, LLC, as well as Blackbird Tech LLC and Empire IP LLC.

Parallel Iron, an IPNav controlled entity, filed suit against VMware (with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA) alleging that defendants’ electronic file storage systems, including those implementing VMware’s vSphere platform for building cloud infrastructures, infringe three patents related to storing data across multiple servers (7,197,662, 7,958,388, and 7,543,177). Parallel Iron last filed suit in Aug. of 2012 against Netflix, and has filed a total of 27 prior suits since Jan. 2011 against over 30 defendants, including Adobe, Adknowledge, Amazon, AOL, BlueArc, EMC, Facebook, Groupon, Hitachi, Hulu, IBM, LinkedIn, LSI, Morgan Stanley, NetApp, Oracle, Samsung, and Twitter. The patents-in-suit were previously owned by Ring Technology before being assigned to Parallel Iron in March 2010. 2/22, District of Delaware, 1:13cv00307.