The last couple of years have seen Texas monetization firm Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC shift away from the acquisition of smaller families of patents from various sources toward the acquisition of large portfolios of assets—of former Kodak patents in March 2017, of former NEC patents in February 2018, and of former American Express patents in March 2018, all from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), as well as a large portfolio of assets acquired directly from Panasonic beginning in October 2018. Dominion (through subsidiaries of its litigation arm Monument Patent Holdings, LLC) has asserted patents from those large-portfolio acquisitions in litigation, and while it has continued litigating assets acquired prior to this strategy shift, that activity has dropped off. Assignment records recently made public by the USPTO suggest that, in addition, Dominion has begun to shed some of the smaller families that it had acquired under its earlier model.

GroupChatter LLC has expanded the scope of its former smart energy grid campaign by filing a new case against Facebook (6:16-cv-00382). Two (8,588,207; 9,014,659) of the four patents already in suit are again asserted against Facebook’s social networking services (including Messenger), as is another patent (9,294,888) in that same family, which issued in late March 2016, as well as a new patent (7,945,249). The ‘249 patent is not related to the others in suit, originally issuing to Alcatel-Lucent before passing through Vringo, Inc.’s hands before assignment to GroupChatter in April 2016.

Cases brought separately in the Eastern District of Texas by NPEs GroupChatter LLC and FastVDO LLC can be added to the list of recent transfers to other districts. On February 11, 2016, Magistrate Judge John D. Love granted a motion by Toshiba subsidiary Landis + Gyr (L+G) to the Northern District of Georgia. GroupChatter had filed a suits in Texas against GE, Itron, L+G, and Sensus between September and November 2015, asserting four patents (7,969,959; 8,199,740; 8,588,207; 9,014,659) against each defendant’s “wide area Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network that enables remote configuration, operation, and monitoring of utility meters”. The patents-in-suit issued to Critical Response Systems, Inc., a Georgia operating company, or to a related entity, Critical Holdings, Inc., and they generally relate to sending alerts to a group of users over a wireless network.

In the first half of October 2015, RPX saw eleven patent transfers to NPEs recorded with the USPTO.

GroupChatter LLC has added cases against Landis+Gyr (6:15-cv-00886), a subsidiary of Toshiba, and Itron (6:15-cv-00900) to the one that it filed against Sensus (6:15-cv-863) just a couple of weeks ago. The three cases assert four patents (7,969,959, 8,199,740, 8,588,207, 9,014,659) against each defendant’s “wide area Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network that enables remote configuration, operation, and monitoring of utility meters”, namely, L+G’s Gridstream, Itron’s OpenWay, and Sensus’s Flexnet.