In the first half of December 2015, RPX saw 14 patent transfers to NPEs recorded with the USPTO. A number of those transactions involved patents that have recently been asserted in litigation against operating companies.

After the asserted claims of two Eolas Technologies Incorporated patents were invalidated in 2012 (a decision upheld by the Federal Circuit in 2013) Eolas and Google have each filed suit based on a newly issued, related patent. Eolas asserted the 9,195,507 patent in cases against Amazon (6:15-cv-01038), Google (6:15-cv-01039), and Wal-Mart (6:15-cv-01040) on November 24, 2015, the same day that the new patent issued. In three separate complaints, the NPE accuses the defendants of infringing the ‘507 patent through the web pages and content accessible via the companies’ websites. The next day, on November 25, Google filed an action (3:15-cv-05446) in the Northern District of California seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement of the ‘507 patent.

Google Inc. and JC Penney have filed complaints for declaratory judgment of non-infringement against Eolas Technologies. In December 2013, Eolas sent cease-and-desist letters to Google and JC Penney accusing the companies of infringing two patents related to methods of running applications on a distributed hypermedia computer network (8,082,293, 8,086,662). Google and JC Penney contend the in-suit patents are siblings of two patents previously asserted by Eolas in 2009 and subsequently invalidated in 2012 (5,838,906, 7,599,985). All four patents claim priority to US Patent Application No. 08/324,443, and Google and JC Penney argue the patents all claim essentially the same subject matter. During examination, the PTO rejected all pending claims in the applications for ‘293 and ‘662, concluding them to be too substantially similar to the claims of the ‘906 and ‘985 patents; a finding Google and JC Penney maintain Eolas did not dispute.