Monetization Firms and Inventor-Managed NPEs Hit E-Commerce and Software in Q4

The top market sector for NPE litigation in Q4 2023 was E-Commerce and Software, accounting for 35% of new defendants added to patent litigation campaigns. Networking saw the second highest amount of NPE litigation in the fourth quarter, followed by Consumer Electronics and PCs, Mobile Communications and Devices, and Financial Services.

Among the wide variety of plaintiffs that hit this sector in the fourth quarter were a quartet of familiar monetization firms. One was Dynamic IP Deals (d/b/a DynaIP): In December, WirelessWERX IP LLC—an entity controlled by DynaIP’s Pueblo Nuevo LLC—filed two new waves of complaints in the location tracking and mapping campaign it launched in late 2022, targeting delivery platforms and family safety products with such features (with new cases continuing into 2024). Another was Equitable IP Corporation, which in December filed a new round of cases in its ongoing push notification campaign through controlled plaintiff Push Data LLC, targeting a host of retailers over their e-commerce apps and websites; the plaintiff has since hit a slew of additional defendants in February. Also joining the fray was publicly traded Acacia Research Corporation, which revived the distributed database processing campaign waged by subsidiary R2 Solutions LLC with a new pair of complaints respectively filed in early October and late December, asserting former Yahoo patents. Georgia-based monetization firm IPInvestments Group LLC (d/b/a IPinvestments Group) additionally resurrected a campaign of its own through associated plaintiff Advanced Transactions, LLC, which in mid-October filed a new round of litigation targeting a wide range of e-commerce technologies, including marketing email systems, gift and customer reward programs, e-commerce websites, and in-store/online ordering services (and brought another complaint in February).

Several inventor-controlled plaintiffs also filed litigation hitting the E-Commerce and Software sector in Q4. In mid-November, Language Technologies, Inc., an entity controlled by an inventor and professor at the University of Arizona, kicked off a new campaign targeting natural language processing products and services—the company apparently pivoting to patent assertion after previously offering mobile apps for sale. Shortly after, a different inventor-managed plaintiff, DigitalDoors, Inc., added a new case in its ongoing data security campaign, shifting its focus from enterprise cloud storage products to banks with systems compliant with certain financial industry requirements concerning the backup of customer data. Public records suggest that DigitalDoors has the backing of a litigation funder linked to a growing number of other patent plaintiffs. Moreover, inventor-managed ENOVSYS LLC filed another complaint in October targeting driver location-tracking features offered by ridesharing apps, asserting patents from an extensively litigated portfolio that the plaintiff previously wielded against cellular carriers in an earlier iteration of its campaign.

See RPX’s fourth-quarter review for more on patent litigation trends in Q4 and 2023 overall.