RPX Data Update: In Q1 2017, Familiar Plaintiffs Abound

In the first quarter of 2017, more than 850 defendants were added to patent litigation campaigns—just over 500 of them in NPE cases. The three most frequent NPE plaintiffs during Q1 each appeared among last year’s Top NPEs: IP Edge LLC; Leigh M. Rothschild; and Monument Patent Holdings, LLC.

IP Edge far outstripped other NPEs at the end of 2016, and early 2017 numbers suggest that its level of activity, relative to the rest of the pack, has continued unabated, with apparent affiliates of the firm having filed at least one campaign in each of the last six months:

• Kaldren LLC                             QR codes                                 March 2017
• RICPI Communications LLC    Two-way radios                        February 2017
• Drogo IP LLC                           Medical diagnostic devices     January 2017
• Micoba LLC                             File-syncing services               December 2016
• Serenitiva LLC                         CRM software                          November 2016
• Guada Technologies LLC        Media search features             October 2016
• Bartonfalls LLC                        Video channel changing          October 2016

Entities controlled by prolific inventor Rothschild not only added defendants to existing campaigns but also launched two new ones in Q1, through Rothschild Biometric Systems, LLC (user verification, January 2017) and Location Based Services, LLC (GPS navigation, February 2017). So did NPEs affiliated with Monument (and related monetization firm Dominion Harbor Group, LLC): Blue Sky Networks, LLC (Bluetooth-enabled devices, February 2017) and Wireless Switch IP, LLC (mobile devices with Wi-Fi, March 2017).

As is also typical, included among the new litigation filed and assignments recorded with the US Patent and Trademark Office during Q1 2017 are many involving patents passing to or from Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV).

For example, Monument received the patents at issue in both the Blue Sky Networks and Wireless Switch IP campaigns from IV. The December 2016 transfer to Blue Sky was recorded in Q1. Various assignments to apparent IV affiliates from operating companies include the following:

• Multiple families of radio transmission, communications protocols, and cellular communications patents from Panasonic (transferred in December 2016 and recorded in January);

• multiple families of patents generally related to memory, bus communications, semiconductor fabrication, data storage, fault tolerance in computer systems, digital delay lines, and radiation sensitive cells from Honeywell (transferred in December 2016 and recorded in February); and

• three mobile payment patents from Mocapay (transferred and recorded in January), adding to the set of similar patents already transferred between the two companies in December 2016.