Patent Filings Roundup: New Magnetar Entity Sues Oracle on Compression Tech; WSOU Changes Course; New Tim Pryor Campaign

Patent filings reverted to the mean this week, with 31 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings (5 post grant reviews and 25 inter partes reviews) and roughly double that (61) for new district court patent complaints. Another four or so denials under Fintiv came this week, mostly over district court trials in Judge Gilstrap’s Eastern District of Texas court—in one case, over a significant relationship with previous petitioners, albeit as part of a set of earlier-reported-on cases. See IPR2020-01101, IPR2020-01358, IPR2020-01399, IPR2020-01400 (affecting Mitek, a group of UAB companies, and Samsung). A few new LLC players—Gesture Technology Partners, LLC, Repeat Precision, LLC—were added in a week that saw relatively few non-practicing entity (NPE) suits and plenty of competitor suits.

WSOU’s Shifting Tactics and Ever-Expanding Campaign: WSOU added modem manufacturer Cisco to their ever-growing pile of lawsuits and accused defendants across industries. The Craig Etchegoyen-run NPE has departed here and in at least one other case from their aggressive strategy of flooding the courts with thirteen or so different single-patent complaints (with no patent overlapping in any other assertion); to date they have filed more than 200 lawsuits this way. Here and in one other suit, they chose different counsel and sued on a subset of patents together in a single complaint. It’s hard to know if this is a technology or family-specific action or just another aggressive change in mode of attack for the litigious entity.

The Irish (Magnetar) Hello: Magnetar Capital-funded Irish NPEs have been dominating the big-ticket NPE litigation landscape for the past few years, but most of those campaigns—Dynamic Data, Solas OLED, Neodron—were sizable portfolios with International Trade Commission components. This week, a new Magnetar entity, Sonrai Memory Ltd., sued Oracle on a single patent—this one acquired from HPE—proving that Magnetar isn’t going away any time soon. The patent, 6,829,691—is a relatively generic set of claims on data compression and decompression with an old date and broad potential applicability.

“Pryor” User Rights: Prolific patent applicant and NPE Timothy Pryor has used yet another LLC to bring suit against a slew of major device manufacturers. The one, called Gesture Technology Partners, LLC, has asserted four patents (8194924, 8553079, 7933431, 8878949) against five defendants (Huawei, Lenovo (and Motorola), Apple, LG, and Samsung). Pryor had previously traded and litigated patents among a web of LLCs, including Motion Games LLC, Great Lakes Intellectual Property, Ltd., PSTP Technologies, Tactile Feedback Technology, and LMI Technologies Inc. The most recent, filed before Judge Gilstrap in the Eastern District of Texas and Judge Albright in the Western, takes aim at virtually all smartphone, pad, and laptop models that use touchless commands.