Grus Tech LLC has launched its first litigation campaign, suing LG Electronics (LGE) (4:20-cv-00192) and Samsung (4:20-cv-00190) in the Eastern District of Texas on the same day that Vulpecula, LLC has hit those two defendants (4:20-cv-00191 and 4:20-cv-00189, respectively) in the same district. Each plaintiff asserts patent(s) naming Robert Paul Morris as the sole inventor, with infringement allegations targeting certain of the defendants’ smartphones. These plaintiffs—two of five Texas entities, formed under similar circumstances roughly one month ago, to initiate litigation this past week—are part of a constellation of entities litigating Morris patents.

Stragent LLC has revived a litigation campaign that has lain dormant for over two years, filing three nearly identical complaints against automakers BMW (6:16-cv-00446), Daimler (6:16-cv-00447), and Geely (Volvo) (6:16-cv-00448). The two asserted patents (8,209,705; 8,566,843) issued in 2012 and 2013 as continuations of an earlier patent (7,802,263) that Stragent asserted in litigation between February 2011 to November 2013 against suppliers of microcontrollers and/or related software to auto manufacturers. The patents generally relate to communicating information (e.g. software updates) across networks of different type. Stragent’s infringement allegations focus on the defendants’ purported migration to AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture), a standardized system of interfaces between automotive network technologies.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court vacated a 2014 Federal Circuit decision that had revived Azure Networks, LLC’s infringement claims against Marvell and several other semiconductor companies. The high court remanded the case back to the Federal Circuit for reconsideration under its more recent decision in Teva v. Sandoz. A key issue in the four-year legal battle with the NPE has been the construction of the term “MAC address” in the claims of 7,756,129, a personal area network patent that Azure has asserted in litigation against more than 20 companies.

Azure Networks [NPE] filed suit against CSR, Atheros, Broadcom, Marvell, Ralink, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments over one patent related to method of communicating between a first peripheral device and a hub device in a personal area network. 3/22, Eastern District of Texas, 6:2011cv00139.