Xueshan Technologies Inc., a subsidiary of Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN), received a large portfolio of patents from MediaTek back in December 2020. The recipient litigated some of them, against Renesas Electronics, from May 2022 into early 2024. Now, another entity has picked up a portfolio from the same source, the transacted assets concerning chip configuration and memory devices and including patents that MediaTek asserted in its own litigation, running from February 2019 through August 2022.

The number of new litigation campaigns tied to Texas monetization firm IPValuation Partners, LLC (also d/b/a IPVal) has dipped since one of its principals left in August 2018, but that litigation has continued. Two of the six known IPVal campaigns launched since 2022 have focused on LED lighting patents, and now, based on recently recorded patent assignments from an operating company to an IPVal-tied entity, it would seem another one is coming. Amid this concentration, the firm has also made what appears to be its foray into “e-seller” litigation.

Eastern District of Virginia Judge David J. Novak has granted an extension well into January 2025 for the parties to file a stipulation of dismissal of the case that Dialect, LLC filed against Amazon back in May 2023. Dialect’s Northern District of California case against Alphabet (Google) has been stayed into February, while its Eastern District of Texas suit against Bank of America, Dialect has just filed a second amended complaint under seal, after Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss claims of presuit, but not postsuit, willfulness and indirect infringement. To this campaign over former Voicebox Technologies patents, Dialect now adds another Eastern District of Texas case, this one against Microsoft (2:24-cv-01067).

Earlier this month, as a judgment loomed in a Unified Patent Court (UPC) action filed by patent owner Huawei against implementer NETGEAR, the defendant asked a US court to bar Huawei from enforcing a potential injunction against it. The motion was the first to ever seek an anti-suit injunction (ASI) targeting the UPC, and the first request for an interim license (sought in the alternative) from a US court in a standard essential patent (SEP) suit. Now, as a hearing approaches in the US case over another motion related to fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) licensing, the UPC’s Munich Local Division (Munich LD) has issued its final merits decision. That opinion, the second ever issued by the UPC in a FRAND case, imposed an injunction against NETGEAR over certain Wi-Fi 6 routers and further clarified the SEP licensing principles first established by the Mannheim Local Division (Mannheim LD) in late November.

Eastern District of Virginia Judge M. Hannah Lauck ordered Patent Quality Assurance (PQA) to comply fully with a local rule requiring “non-publicly traded entities such as LLCs” to identify its “owners or members”. By the December 17 deadline, PQA filed an updated disclosure, unredacted for the court but with redactions occluding its “owners or members” from public view, filing a concurrent motion to seal its disclosure, not only keeping it permanently from the public, but also asking the court to deny VLSI Technology LLC, the Fortress Investment Group LLC plaintiff in the case, access to who is behind PQA.

Omni MedSci, Inc. has filed a single Eastern District of Texas complaint against Fossil, OnePlus, Oura Health, and Samsung (2:24-cv-01070), alleging infringement of five patents: two new to litigation, two previously asserted against Apple, and one litigated by an associated, but different, plaintiff. The list of accused products here is long, with the plaintiff justifying joinder by pleading that “[b]ecause Samsung, Fossil, OnePlus, and Ōura wearable devices are configured to measure physiological parameters and to transmit associated data signals wirelessly to smartphones and tablets, including Samsung and OnePlus smartphones and tablets, there is significant overlap of the components of the accused systems provided and supported by each Defendant”.

VirtaMove, Corp. (f/k/a Appzero) has filed separate Western District of Texas complaints against Microsoft (7:24-cv-00338) and Oracle (7:24-cv-00339). Against each defendant in this campaign—including prior defendants Alphabet (Google), Amazon, HP Enterprise (HPE), and IBM—the plaintiff asserts the same two virtual file containerization patents. Infringement allegations against Microsoft focus on the provision of the Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, Azure Container Registry, and Azure Container Apps; against Oracle, of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Kubernetes Engine. VirtaMove has moved to dismiss an August 2024 declaratory judgment complaint filed in the Northern District of California by IBM subsidiary Red Hat.

One-E-Way, Inc.’s 2020 case against Apple ended in August 2023 when the Federal Circuit affirmed a Central District of California summary judgment of noninfringement. That ruling was based on an agreed-upon construction of the claim term “unique user code”: “fixed code (bit sequence) specifically associated with one use of a device(s)”. Per the court, “unique user code” is therefore “associated with one user of a device, and not the device itself”. Now, One-E-Way has asserted the same two patents previously in suit against Apple, as well as a third, against Anker Innovations (1:24-cv-01559), Dell (1:24-cv-01558), and Samsung (1:24-cv-01561), in new Western District of Texas complaints. Targeted is the provision of wireless headphones and speakers that support “wireless transmission and/or reception of an audio signal in compliance with versions of the Bluetooth standard”, including Bluetooth 5.0.

XiFi Networks R&D, Inc. has filed suit against Samsung (2:24-cv-01057) over the provision of products that support multiple link operation over Wi-Fi 7, including smartphones, tablets, laptops and Chromebooks, TVs, and smartwatches. For each asserted patent, the Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphone is listed as a “representative example” of Samsung’s infringement, with nine wireless networking patents asserted in the new Eastern District of Texas complaint.

The recent transfer of a batch of US patents to a new Texas LLC is the first divestiture to appear in publicly available USPTO records from a British Virgin Islands entity that seemed, up to now, to be in the sole business of collecting patents. For more than ten years, the assignor—through nearly 70 separate transfers—has been observed scooping up US patent assets, from large operating companies; smaller businesses, some of which have ceased operations; at least one university and one prominent research institution; inventor-controlled entities; IP advisory firms; and other NPEs, only a few of which had previously filed litigation. The newly recorded assignment, to a Texas entity, is a shift, suggesting that more change may be afoot here.