RPX recently noted that a “Puzzling Pair of ‘Vilox’ Plaintiffs File[d] New Suits in West Texas” (December 2022). A “Vilox Technologies, LLC” and a “Vilox, LLC”—each claiming to be a Texas LLC but neither appearing to exist—attempted to extend an inventor-controlled campaign over a previously litigated patent family generally related to searching a database through “descriptors” that correspond to a “data category”. The pair of putative plaintiffs did so by suing Oracle and Salesforce in separate Western District of Texas complaints. Oracle has now responded—with a complaint of its own, this one filed under seal in the District of Delaware (1:23-cv-00126).

Vilox Technologies LLC, a Texas-based NPE managed by inventor Joseph De Bellis, has filed suit against MindGeek (2:16-cv-01278), accusing the company of infringing three patents (6,760,720; 7,188,100; 7,302,423) that generally relate to online, “on-the-fly” searching, where queries can be modified during the query using certain categories or keywords. At issue in the MindGeek complaint is the search functionality offered on several of the company’s websites, which offer various types of adult content.

On December 1, 2015, amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), approved by the US Supreme Court in April 2015, took effect. The amendments touch several aspects of litigation in federal court but primarily focus on earlier stages, including pleading requirements, initial case management, and the scope of discovery. The changes appear to have motivated a significant number of filings in the weeks before the effective date of the changes, as over 580 patent infringement cases, including nearly 500 NPE cases, were filed in the last two weeks of November.

Inventor-controlled Vilox Technologies LLC filed its first wave of infringement suits, hitting Expedia (2:15-cv-01457), Foot Locker (2:15-cv-01458), Orbitz (2:15-cv-01459), Priceline (2:15-cv-01460), and TripAdvisor (2:15-cv-01461). In five separate complaints, Vilox asserts different combinations of a group of four patents related to “on-the-fly” search methods; that is, searches that can be refined by certain categories or keywords at any point during the query (6,760,720; 7,188,100; 7,302,423; 7,574,432). Vilox alleges that the search features of the defendants’ websites infringe the patents-in-suit.