Patent Filings Roundup: IP Edge Hits Hardware Stores, Media Websites; Home Security Cam ITC Fight Goes Live

It was a heavy week for patent filings, with 78 new district court complaints and 41 new Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) petitions, all inter partes reviews (IPRs). IP Edge and Leigh Rothschild entities made up the bulk of those district court filings, while on the Board front, a number of long-running campaigns saw patents challenged, including the wide-ranging Express Mobile suits, some Divx [Fortress] challenges, and a number of challenges against the Xerox-owned Palo Alto Research Center.

Verkada Fight Over Home Security Cams Spills into ITC, District Court: A three-way fight between, on one side, Motorola and Avigilon, and on the other, Verkada, a smaller rival in the home security systems market, has come to a head this week, with Motorola and Avigilon filing an International Trade Commission (ITC) complaint and Verkada filing a declaratory judgment action of noninfringement of the asserted patents. Verkada pleads in the latter that the larger competitor Avigilon is effectively trying to shut them out of the market by seeking to exclude their products from the United States via ITC complaint.

IP Edge Sub Targets Assorted Generic Websites: In four new suits in Delaware this week, IP Edge subsidiary Nimitz Technologies LLC, using three patents on relatively generic internet architecture (streaming involving a server and a recipient, more or less) has sued four small (relatively speaking) internet web-only companies—CNET Media, Bleacher Report, Pinterest, and Reddit—for their use of widely adopted streaming services architecture, including HLS (effectively, HTTP live-streaming) and MPEG-DASH (both standardized versions of how to organize streaming media transactions). Bleacher Report, which is owned by AT&T, is likely indemnified, which should make early rounds of challenge interesting. One would assume that, if these companies infringe, nearly any company with a website would as well. The patents are U.S. 7,590,991, 7,227,899, and 7,848,328, and were all acquired by IP Edge from sovereign nation NPE France Brevets.

IP Edge Targets Big Box Hardware Stores: IP Edge entity Optical Licensing LLC has continued to assert their one memory patent, U.S. 6,791,898, this time hauling Home Depot and Lowe’s into court in Waco before Judge Albright.

The only accused product in the Home Depot complaint is an adjustable thermostat (the “Velux Active Indoor Climate Control Starter Kit” with standard memory attached, with a footnote that notes “The Accused Product is just one of the products provided by Defendant, and Plaintiff’s investigation is on-going to additional products to be included as an Accused Product that may be added at a later date.” For their part, Lowe’s is accused of infringing just the “Velux Active Kit,” with the same footnote. The patent has a tortured history, including spending some time parked with a Vector Capital Corporation subsidiary; it relates to memory devices.

Until just this past month, IP Edge had never taken any of their thousands of filed complaints to trial; recently, an ITC investigation for one of their controlled entities made it to the hearing phase, though they still have yet to appear before a jury in any of their filed cases. After these two additional suits, they have now accused 11 defendants in 2021 (none previously), and have settled with the first six. 

PTAB (41)

District Court (78)