Patent Filings Roundup: District Court Termination Wave, Old-Fashioned Oil Fights, NPE Targets Apple and Others

A slightly above-average week in patent filings saw 38 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) petitions (one post grant review and 37 inter partes reviews) and 71 district court complaints, with another massive wave of district court terminations—likely due at least in part to parties voluntarily dismissing cases and refiling them based on recent venue rulings, though it’s hard to capture, as many are simple voluntary dismissals. There also appears to have been an RPX settlement of Proven Networks (based on conjecture given the public dockets and en masse terminations); a batch of new non-practicing entity (NPE) campaigns (many spun out from Intellectual Ventures-licensed patents), including Buffalo Patents, a new single-patent DynaIP retail suit, LINFO IP, LLC, against CVS, Sears, Costco, and Target, among others; and while it isn’t captured here, Intellectual Ventures just yesterday itself launched its first major suit in years on IV Funds I and II; more on that next week.

Old-Fashioned Fight in the Oil Field: In a colorful complaint, an LLC formed to “exploit” a patent sued the inventor and assignee of all right, title, and interest in the patent, alleging that Jones contracted to sell his patented oil gauge invention—now owned, they allege, by the LLC—and was terminated shortly thereafter, released his position in the company and all of his rights to the patent, but nonetheless violated and continues to violate the patent rights by trying to compete. It’s a messy complaint with lots of salacious allegations, and it’s been a long time since I have seen a company who isn’t the actual listed assignee sue the assignee themselves for patent infringement. The case is JRT Gauges, LLC (themselves now allegedly owned by AEH Holdings LLC, or Transcontinental Energy Resource, LLC), 4:21-cv-03344, and the patent is U.S. 10,295,392.

Litigation-Funded Semiconductor NPE Moves on to Apple, TSMC: After suing (and apparently successfully collecting against) AMD, MediaTek, and Samsung, Intel, and Ibiden, litigation-funded Continental Circuits LLC and their Texas subsidiary, Continental Circuits of Texas LLC have now sued Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Apple on a group of four expired patents related to circuit boards. The previous cases had listed TSMC products and processes and there is an ongoing attempt to affect service in the MediaTek case.  The patents themselves come from a now-bankrupt Florida company that produced circuit boards. In the Intel case, the judge ordered discovery into who was financing the campaign, but the case quickly moved to arbitration and closed. The patents are 8278560, 8581105, 7501582, 9374912 and the cases are 2:21-cv-00383 and 6:21-cv-01049.