Three transfers of US patents recently recorded with the USPTO and made public—one from an optoelectronics company to an entity in a growing family of funded plaintiffs, one from an individual inventor who ended a litigation campaign last September, and one of former NEC assets passing through a Singaporean entity to a potential Delaware plaintiff—all bear watching over the coming months.

Sol IP, LLC has returned to litigation, suing Ford (2:22-cv-00097) in the Eastern District of Texas over five patents that have already appeared in this campaign, begun with suits against wireless carriers AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. Targeted in the complaint are automobiles that incorporate in-vehicle communication systems that support LTE and/or LTE-Advanced connectivity. Despite a recent ruling from the Federal Circuit on the approach, Sol IP pleads jurisdiction and venue based on, among other things, the presence of “authorized dealerships, which act as agents for Ford for the purposes of conducting Ford’s business, including, at least, selling cars (including infringing cars) to consumers and performing warranty services”.

After a purported five years of unsuccessful negotiations, Sol IP, LLC has thrown the patent book at Qualcomm (6:21-cv-00270), accusing the chipmaker of infringing 28 patents, broadly directed to wireless communications, including LTE, 5G, and Wi-Fi technologies. The plaintiff pleads that it is “an intellectual-property licensing company organized and existing as a limited liability company under the laws of Virginia” that “holds an exclusive license to the Asserted Patents from” Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a South Korean research institution, “which transferred to Sol IP all substantial rights in those patents”.

The second half of 2018 saw a number of NPEs launch US litigation campaigns asserting patents developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a South Korean research institution. In at least two of those campaigns (including one kicked off by Sol IP, LLC last week), the plaintiffs are purported exclusive licensees of the patents-in-suit—an arrangement that has yielded mixed results for ETRI and its licensees.