RPX’s last look at notable patent assignments considered the movement of assets to Ueran Technology LLC from Huawei; to AX Wireless, LLC from SOLiD; to VideoLabs, Inc. from DCX US Agility Platform LLC, a subsidiary of DXC Technology; to Flash Uplink LLC from its publicly traded parent Quest Patent Research Corporation (QPRC); to various entities from Ascend Innovation Management, LLC entities; and to Nera Innovations Limited from multiple entities associated with Atlantic IP Services. It is time for a review of additional notable transfers recorded since then.

Inventor-controlled Mobility Workx, LLC has filed suit against Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) (4:17-cv-00567), asserting two patents generally aimed at the allocation of resources in a wireless network. The NPE identifies the components that implement, collectively, T-Mobile’s LTE network, including components identified in the relevant LTE standard: Evolved – Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network NodeB (“eNB”) (with Nokia’s 9926 eNodeB given as an example), Mobility Management Entity (“MME”) (example given, Nokia’s 9471 Wireless Mobility Manager), Serving Gateway (“S-GW”) (Nokia’s 7750 Service Router), and User Equipment (“UE”) (Samsung’s Galaxy S8) components.

The University of Florida Research Foundation, Incorporated has filed suit against GE (1:17-cv-00171) and Koninklijke Philips (1:17-cv-00170), accusing the two companies of infringing a single patent (7,062,251) generally related to the processing and display of medical data against the defendants’ data connectivity systems and products related to medical care. Both complaints assert that as an arm of the state of Florida, the university “enjoys sovereign immunity”, further “expressly reserv[ing] its sovereign immunity from any inter partes review” (IPR). In January, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) held for the first time, in an IPR filed by Covidien against the same university (IPR2016-01276), that the states’ Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity extends to universities.

In the second half of January 2016, RPX saw ten patent transfers to NPEs recorded with the USPTO. At least one of those transactions involved a patent that has already been asserted in litigation against operating companies.