Patent Filings Roundup: Intellectual Ventures Jumps Stalled Car Campaign; DJ against Mystery Sons of Innovation LLC; Another Hundred Suits Dismissed

It was a (relatively) light Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) and district court week, with 26 PTAB (two post grant reviews and 24 inter partes reviews) and 48 new district court complaints, and the number of dismissals or closed cases in district court again reaching nearly 100 for the third week in a row—I’m unsure exactly, though I suspect it has something to do with a fair number of cases being voluntarily dismissed and refiled in other jurisdictions following renewed vigor in venue analysis after the Federal Circuit’s recent round of mandamuses of Judge Albright’s cases (he’s up to 17 mandamuses on the issue of venue, mostly over the past calendar year by my count, which as far as I know is a single-judge record).

The district court notably saw Magentar/Atlantic IP subsidiary Aire sue Apple (after suing Google and Samsung) on contactless pay systems, following Magnetar/Atlantic IP’s now-standard modus operandi; the funded Irish NPEs continue to roll against various portfolios directed to features of handsets, among other things. Most frequent filer WSOU settled with Huawei and dismissed all pending IPRs and district court litigations shortly after claim construction in the Western District of Texas (on at least 13 patents); and a few large-scale pharma litigations launched. Of note at the Board was a batch of institutions by generic or potential competitors against a tranche of Johnson & Johnson subsidiary AMO’s Lasik eye surgery patents.

Intellectual Ventures Tries Jumpstarting Stalled Car Campaign: Despite the licensing success of IV Fund I and Fund II against major technology companies in many industries years past, many whole industries never licensed those giant pools before IV began to fail and break up (comprising upwards of 10,000 assets). Notably, IV tried, and failed, to licensed major car OEMs through aggressive ITC litigation years ago—litigation that was marked by strategic blunders, from a failure to perfect title prior to filing (leading to a need to refile the expensive ITC complaints) to losing the patent claims raised to various overwhelmingly successful challenges, to losing the case-in-chief before the ITC. There was also a failed attempt to use seemingly unwilling licensee Ford to establish ersatz domestic industry there, though the details are a bit muddier.

Well, years later—after Arvin Patel took over the struggling giant a few years ago, and just days after some aggressive articles in IAM suggesting the auto industry should be taking licenses, even at this late date—IV has filed overlapping sets of patents against GM, Toyota, and Honda, pleading that those companies should be licensed to IV’s remaining assets in those funds. The suits were unsurprisingly filed in the Eastern and Western districts of Texas. The suits were followed swiftly by another set of articles and statements suggesting that this assertion was different than the failed campaign of years past; nonetheless, it looks an awful lot like round two in an attempt to leverage OEMs into an IV license. It’s most notable as the first major offensive by IV itself in years, rather than through smaller subsidiaries it has licensed subsets of tranches of its portfolios to. The patents there, per usual for IV, are a grab bag of technologies meant, I suspect, to emphasize the breadth—if not depth—of the rest of the giant pool of assets controlled by the fund.

NetScout Files DJ against Mystery ‘Sons of Innovation’ NPE: Edge computing company (and Michigan darling) NetScout aggressively moved this week to file a declaratory judgment action against NPE of unknown parentage “Sons of Innovation, LLC.” Formed in April just prior to closing a 56-asset patent license purchase from Circadence, Sons recently sent a letter to Netscout on just one of those patents, U.S. 7,257,081, suggesting that a broader letter campaign is ongoing. Other than counsel and location, nothing is said about Sons itself, and little is known at this time—though information is, as always, welcome.