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.

During November 2017, RPX completed three acquisitions on behalf of its patent risk management network, obtaining rights to the patents involved either to end litigation against its members or to prevent it in the first place. The acquisitions occurred within the E-Commerce and Software market sector.

During the first half of February, RPX saw the recordation with the USPTO of multiple past assignments of patent assets to various NPEs, including multiple entities affiliated with California attorney Kevin Zilka’s Oso IP, LLC recording the past assignment of patent assets between them, assets originally received from Hard Data Factory (online data scraping), Go2 Media (mobile media), or InstantBull (content aggregation). As usual, several of the other noted transfers involved apparent affiliates of Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), which records made available during this period reveal has received patent assets generally related to three-dimensional data modeling (received from DeltaSphere) and mobile payment platforms (received from Mocapay).

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.

During the first half of March 2016, RPX saw seven patent transfers to known NPEs recorded with the USPTO. At least one of those transactions involved a patent that has been asserted in litigation against operating companies.

Aloft Media [NPE] filed suit against SAP over a patent related to middleware systems.  3/9, 6:2011cv00110