Patent Filings Roundup: IP Edge End-of-Year Filing Spree, WSOU Ends Year as Top Single-Entity Filer; AC Competitors Go to War Over a Cool Million

Combining the holiday break, we see a steady 24 and 25 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) petitions filed in the last two weeks, respectively, with 84 and 71 District Court complaints filed, respectively. The 84 was again bumped up roughly 10 by another round of WSOU patent filings, this time against Salesforce; otherwise it was the typical mix of small file-and-settle non-practicing entity (NPE) additions (mostly IP Edge, seemingly filling out some kind of annual quotas, and with a new campaign against shuttle services), bigger funded NPEs like Acacia and Dominion Harbor entities, small filers, and a smattering of company-company filings. Cedar Lane also ended the year strong, adding a few logs to the yule fire.

IP Edge Filing Spree Before the Ball Drops: More on this next week when I do a little year-in-review analysis, but IP Edge filed dozens of suits in the final week of the year, just under the wire (though that’s not atypical of them), bringing their total 2020 filings to record levels. It’s hard to track all of their subsidiaries, but suffice it to say that, right now, it’s clear they filed many hundreds of suits

Air Conditioning Fight Heats Up: Two competitors in the commercial air conditioning space, finally fed up with licensing negotiations over what one characterizes as a novel A-frame design for condensed air circulation, have headed to court, amid allegations of willful infringement of at least three U.S. patents of relatively recent vintage, U.S. Patents 10,551,126, 10,527,354, and 9,551,532.  I can’t help (myself) but wonder: will cooler heads prevail?

WSOU Filings Continue to Clog Courts: Newer litigant WSOU Holdings (run by Craig Etchegoyen, who, when he headed Uniloc defaulted on loans to Fortress IP and lost control of the entire Uniloc patent) ended the year strong, as the most frequent single-entity litigant, by far, having filed more than 5% of all District Court cases in 2020. In the final holiday weeks, they added another dozen or so suits against Salesforce, and have now brought roughly a dozen individual suits against more than a dozen U.S. companies, all based on unique patents that are part of a 4,000+ Nokia portfolio earlier acquired.  Assuming that trend continues, more US companies will soon feel the sting of a suite of WSOU suits, and with few settling, they will continue to pile up on court dockets, in particular the Western District of Texas.

Week of December 28, 2021

Week of January 4, 2021

PTAB (25)

District Court (71)