Patent Filings Roundup: Ice Castle Patent Asserted Against Competitors; Open-Source Chip Declaratory Judgment Action

It was a pretty normal week patent filings-wise, with 65 district court complaints and 38 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) petitions filed, all inter partes reviews (IPRs).

Frozen Assets Asserted: I’ve heard of castles built on sand and castles built in the sky, but this patent is about those built of ice—and the apparent cutthroat nature of the niche but seemingly quite profitable business. Ice Castles, LLC, according to them, is a Utah-based “awe-inspiring, must-see winter phenomenon built with hundreds of thousands of icicles that brings fairy tales to life.” Per them, founder Brent Christensen began experimenting with ice buildings as a hobby in the winter of 2009, and the following year, made one for a local resort; he patented his method of making these ice structures, which was granted in 2013. His business flourished, as he started both making ice castles, selling tickets, and leasing and managing other destination locations in other states, including New Hampshire.

Well, this week they sued Harbor Enterprises Marketing & Productions, Lester Spear, and Cameron Clan Snack Co. LCC on U.S. Patent 8,511,042, claiming the Maine-based company had constructed an infringing ice castle in Maine in 2021, and charged an admission fee, including multiple photos of the Maine location in their complaint. The complaint doesn’t allege any facts related to copying or any other relationship between the groups. The independent claim reads:

1. 1. A method for constructing a structure from ice in a low-temperature environment, the method comprising: providing a plurality of icicles; attaching icicles to each other to form a framework of icicles, the framework having spaces therein, wherein the icicles are attached to each other by:

applying a slush mixture of ice and water to at least a first of two icicles to be attached to each other, the first icicle being vertically positioned;

contacting a desired portion of the second of the two icicles to the first icicle at a location where the slush was applied, the second icicle being positioned perpendicularly to the first icicle; and

maintaining a relationship between the second icicle to the first icicle until the slush mixture is sufficiently frozen to secure the two icicles to each other;

growing additional ice on the framework; and

repeating the steps of providing icicles, attaching icicles to each other and to the existing framework, and growing additional ice on the framework until the structure is completed.

The plaintiff, for their part, asks for treble damages for willfulness and an exceptional fee award—that’s cold.

QuickLogic Fires Off Open-Source DJ Against Venkat Konda: A relatively unique declaratory judgment action filed this week requires a little background. QuickLogic is apparently licensed to the Konda Technologies portfolio (consisting of roughly 15 granted patents on certain field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)) per a 2010 agreement between the parties. Venkat Konda is a little notorious for routinely raising claims of plagiarism and fraud against multiple parties, including multiple accusations on his website. Here, Konda started sending letters threatening suit in April 2021 arguing that, by joining an open-source initiative, QuickLogic had “failed to commercialize,” the invention, in the words of QuickLogic’s DJ complaint. The complaint argues for noninfringement and for non-breach of contract. The initiatives, Open Source FPGA the QuickLogic Open Reconfigurable Computing Initiative, seem to have been joined, founded, or created to attempt to generate an alternative open-source architecture for basic FPGAs that can be used by companies, free of licensing concerns.