The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw the number of petitions for AIA review filed against NPEs drop by more than half in August 2017, down to 30 petitions from 68 in July. Petitions were brought in August against publicly traded Finjan Holdings, Inc., inventor Leigh M. Rothschild, and a mix of prolific private litigants, including Blackbird Tech LLC, Realtime Data LLC, and Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited. Meanwhile, the Board instituted trial in August for petitions against a variety of entities, including the California Institute of Technology and publicly traded Quarterhill Inc. as well as IP Bridge, Inc.; Realtime Data; and Uniloc. The PTAB also issued final decisions throughout August in campaigns waged by publicly traded Acacia Research Corporation; Advanced Touchscreen and Gesture Technologies, LLC; Elm 3DS Innovations LLC; and Rosetta-Wireless Corporation.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw petitions for AIA review filed against a variety of prolific litigants in June 2017, including General Patent Corporation, Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), Quarterhill Inc. (f/k/a Wi-LAN Inc.), Realtime Data LLC, Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited, and Xperi Corporation (f/k/a Tessera Holding Corporation). Also in June, the PTAB instituted trial for petitions brought against patents asserted in a variety of sprawling campaigns, including some waged by Acacia Research Corporation, IV, Papst Licensing, Quarterhill, and VirnetX Inc. The Board further issued final decisions throughout June in AIA reviews against patents involved in several notable campaigns, including some waged by Document Security Systems, Inc., Elm 3DS Innovations LLC, Empire IP LLC, and Quarterhill.

In the third quarter of last year, Wi-LAN, Inc. joined Acacia Research Corporation to become one of the two most active publicly traded NPEs in patent litigation (among the over 20 publicly traded NPEs that RPX monitors). But while Acacia and WiLAN have continued to share that distinction over the past year, according to the NPEs’ recent earnings reports, they ended Q3 2016 with markedly different overall results.

A Texas judge has severed and stayed the majority of asserted claims from a case against Apple after the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted multiple inter partes reviews (IPRs) against nearly all of the claims at issue. In an order issued on October 5, District Judge Rodney Gilstrap partly granted a motion to sever and stay the entire proceeding filed by Apple in a May 2015 lawsuit brought by Acacia Research Corporation subsidiary Parthenon Unified Memory Architecture LLC (2:15-cv-00621). Judge Gilstrap severed all of the asserted claims from four of the patents-in-suit (5,812,789; 5,960,464; 7,321,368; 7,542,045) into a new action, given that the PTAB had granted review of all challenged claims from those patents, and immediately ordered that the new case be stayed (2:16-cv-01098). However, because the PTAB instituted trial only for a portion of the claims from the fifth patent (7,777,753), Judge Gilstrap declined to sever or stay any of the claims from that patent in the original case.