The fray between Fortress Investment Group LLC and Erich Spangenberg, over the transfer of a single patent currently active in litigation against Amazon, has now migrated from New York to Texas. The patent-at-issue is one among many assigned by Marathon Patent Group, Inc. to Fortress in 2017 after the NPE failed to repay Fortress $15.99M in debt financing. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) developed the patent, and it was the subject of litigation against Apple that ended in a reported $24.9M settlement in 2016.

Inventor-controlled NPE Lemaire Illumination Technologies LLC has added Microsoft (2:17-cv-00729) to its sole litigation campaign, just over two weeks after the dismissal of its two lawsuits against LG Electronics (LGE). As in those previous cases, Microsoft is alleged to infringe three patents generally related to controlling and powering a solid-state light source such as a light-emitting diode (LED), with the color-adjusted camera flash systems of its Lumia 950 smartphone lineup at issue (including those from the single- and dual-SIM variants of the smaller Lumia 950 as well as the Lumia 950 XL).