Patent Filings Roundup: Old IP Edge Filings Explode; No New Discretionary Denials Again; Fortress-Backed DivX Rolls On

It was a return to form this week in the district courts, with 115 new patent filings (led by more than 40 new IP Edge complaints) to just 23 new Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings—the latter number being bolstered by a number of challenges to patents held by Raymond Anthony Joao subsidiary Beteiro, LLC by a conglomerate of gambling companies, including PointsBet USA, DraftKings, Inc., BetMGM, LLC, Hillside New Jersey LLC, and Entain Corporate Services Ltd. Micron filed another set of challenges against Katana Silicon Technologies patents, Ecobee challenged another Magnetar entity, Ollnova, which has brought suit on Internet of Things (IoT) related devices; and it was another week without any discretionary denials.

Flurry of New (Old) IP Edge Filings: After three weeks in October of relative silence, IP Edge subsidiaries again exploded at the end of the month with 49 new filings, all from old subsidiaries, including Stormborn Technologies, Guada, Waverly, Locket, Batann, Avayla, Mellaconic, Triumph, and the like. Sitting outside of this, it looks like Edge has gone back to the well of their older well-trod campaigns, filing a flurry of cases in otherwise heavily used, expired, or largely moribund campaigns; it suggests someone is under some kind of revenue pressure and trying to squeeze some blood from a stone. It’s also worth noting that Liilian Woung, one of the three founders, has disappeared from IP Edge’s website, possibly suggesting either some shakeup in leadership there, or some other reason.

Most interestingly, they do seem to now be working to avoid Delaware, and filing—which wasn’t their habit—more cases in the Western District of Texas, in addition to a smattering of home-district filings all over the nation.  It looks like they’re going to what I’d call their secondary targets—home districts of companies where there’s no issue with venue, but no reliable slow docket—versus what they were enjoying in Delaware, which was a very long time-to-trial, which gave them a low-margin way to push settlement discussions for longer without spending much money.

Acacia Suit Adds ADT, Ademco, Residio: Via their associated entity, Stingray IP Solutions, Acacia has added home security companies ADT, Ademco, and Residio, some of them in the Eastern District of Texas, to their ongoing suits against Johnson Controls and TP Link; patents read on mobile networks using the ZigBee and Z-Wave protocols (effectively, communication standards used primarily with and between IoT devices). The patents are old Harris Network patents, and some had been asserted earlier against Samsung.

Fortress-backed DivX LLC Streaming Campaign Rolls On: Keep watching—the heavily litigated, Fortress-backed DivX LLC campaign, asserting patents related to, ostensibly, video streaming codecs, has hit Vizio and Amazon, in addition to the more often-targeted streamers they did battle with in the past. Five patents asserted against both look identical; time will tell how successful they are.

PTAB (23)

 District Court (115)

This article was updated on November 3 to delete an incorrect statement about the affiliation of Katana Silicon Technologies.