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.

After the first two cases in its campaign were transferred from their original venue to the Northern District of California, inventor-controlled Word to Info, Inc. has filed its subsequent cases, all in 2017, in various districts: against Nuance Communications in the District of Massachusetts in January, against Microsoft in the Western District of Washington in April, against Amazon in the District of Delaware in June, and, now, against Apple (2:17-cv-00592) in the Eastern District of Texas. The same seven patents, generally related to natural language processing, are asserted in the new complaint, with Word to Info focusing its infringement allegations on the operation of Apple’s Siri digital assistant software.

Inventor-controlled Word to Info, Inc. has filed another new case in its natural language processing campaign, asserting the same seven patents (5,715,468; 6,138,087; 6,609,091; 7,349,840; 7,873,509; 8,326,603; 8,688,436) against Amazon (1:17-cv-00691) in Delaware. This new complaint targets Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant software and joins one active case in Massachusetts, filed in January against Nuance Communications and another in the Western District of Washington, filed in April against Microsoft. Roughly one month ago, the Massachusetts court became the second to reject a defendant’s motion to dismiss arguing that the five most recent patents in the asserted family are invalid due to defects in their chain of priority.

Word to Info, Inc. has filed suit against Microsoft (2:17-cv-00596) in the Western District of Washington, asserting the same seven patents (5,715,468; 6,138,087; 6,609,091; 7,349,840; 7,873,509; 8,326,603; 8,688,436) that have been at issue in the natural language processing campaign that the NPE began back in December 2014. At issue is Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant; the new case follows the filing of a motion for partial dismissal by Nuance Communications in the District of Massachusetts that essentially repeats arguments, already rejected by the Northern District of California, concerning whether the later-issuing patents in Word to Info’s family are invalid for failure to properly perfect their chains of priority to the earlier patents.

Word to Info, Inc. has added a suit against Nuance Communications (1:17-cv-10054) to its briefly dormant litigation campaign. The inventor-controlled NPE’s latest complaint accuses Nuance of infringing the same family of knowledge representation patents (5,715,468; 6,138,087; 6,609,091; 7,349,840; 7,873,509; 8,326,603; 8,688,436) asserted in the plaintiff’s two other cases against Facebook (3:15-cv-03485) and Google (3:15-cv-03486), which were dismissed in December and November of last year. At issue are Nuance products and services for the medical community that utilize the company’s LinKBase ontology platform, a technology that uses natural language processing to break down text with medical terminology into discrete concepts and data that computers can more easily process.

Word to Info, Inc.’s suits against Google and Facebook assert a family of patents developed by the entity’s owner, Robert Budzinski. The seven patents-in-suit relate to encoding data for storage and management using natural language processing (5,715,468, 6,138,087, 6,609,091, 7,349,840, 7,873,509, 8,326,603, 8,688,436). Search functions from Google and Facebook that rely on natural language processing to return results are accused of infringing the family of patents asserted in litigation.