Following IPR proceedings initiated by Apple, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) invalidated all claims of an Achates Reference Publishing patent (5,982,889) and multiple claims of a second patent owned by the NPE (6,173,403). Between 2007 and 2011, Achates asserted the patents in litigation against 22 companies including Apple, Citrix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, McAfee, Microsoft, and Symantec. The complaints accused defendants’ products that employed activation technology of infringing the patents-in-suit. The ‘403 patent is a continuation-in-part of the ‘889 patent; both patents relate to software activation and originate with Jason Paul DeMont, a co-founder of Achates.