As part of the monetization firm's end-of-November sprint, apparent IP Edge LLC plaintiff Jade Licensing LLC filed a Western District of Texas suit against Broadcom (Brocade Communications Systems) (6:21-cv-01239) over a single patent originally issuing to Huawei. Jade Licensing accuses Brocade of infringing the optical communications patent through the provision of optical transceiver modules. Its new case follows on the heels of a magistrate judge's report and recommendation that suggests that another IP Edge plaintiff, well into a larger campaign over another patent acquired from the same source, is on its way to defeating an Alice challenge.
IP Edge acquired the patent-in-suit (8,509,622) in January 2021 as part of a 40-plus asset transaction from Huawei to Mason Licensing LLC, one of IP Edge's many Texas LLCs. Mason Licensing transferred it in mid-November to Jade. (USPTO metadata identifies the assignor of the '622 patent as Magnolia Licensing LLC, another IP Edge entity, which took possession of a large portfolio of assets from Technicolor SA in the middle of last year; however, a review of the document filed with the USPTO confirms that the assignor of the '622 patent is Mason, not Magnolia.)
This campaign appears to be the first in which any of those patents transacted this past January is asserted, but it is not the first IP Edge campaign over a former Huawei patent. In June 2018, Huawei assigned a single asset to IP Edge entity Altair Logix LLC, following up with nearly a dozen more US patents, to IP Edge itself, in February 2019 and then with nearly 75 assets, assigned to the firm's Apex Net LLC in September of that year.
Altair Logix has litigated its former Huawei patent (acquired from Futurengine LLC) in a campaign that has since hit 64 defendants. The litigation has proceeded in typical IP Edge fashion—file and settle—with only two cases still active. NETGEAR, sued in July 2020, has filed a motion challenging the patent eligibility of the subject matter of that patent, as drawn to the abstract idea of "data processing". Earlier this month, District of Delaware Magistrate Judge Christopher J. Burke recommended that the motion be denied, indicating that NETGEAR's characterization of claim 1 of the patent-in-suit, as merely directly to "data processing" omits "the meat of the claim": "Instead, it is directed to an apparatus that requires particular components that are configured in a particular way—an apparatus that the patent says helps improve the way computers work". Meanwhile, a case against Universal Remote Control, filed in the Southern District of New York in August 2021, remains in early stages.
IP Edge farmed the February 2019 batch of former Huawei patents out to controlled entities that launched multiple campaigns: Bexley Solutions LLC (over network routers); Devine Licensing LLC (over database management systems); Enchanted IP LLC (over battery chargers); Kaleasy Tech LLC (over enterprise video conferencing and chat services); Saros Licensing LLC (over smart home appliances); and Theta Chip LLC (over digital cameras). In total, to date, that portfolio acquisition has hit over 80 campaign defendants.
Far fewer of the patents acquired through Apex Net have made their way into litigation. At the end of July 2021, IP Edge plaintiff Couture Licensing LLC accused Verizon (Verizon Wireless) of infringing two such patents, both generally related to optical networking technology. Before that, the firm moved several assets to controlled entities Decatur Licensing LLC (targeting the provision of various devices that support 5G by 11 campaign defendants) and Orbit Licensing LLC (focusing on web tools and related products provided by 10 campaign defendants) for litigation. Since then, in late November, Apex Net moved a single of its former Huawei patents (generally related to "multimedia recordings") to Veranda IP LLC, which has yet to file suit.
The approximately 170 campaign defendants that IP Edge has hit so far through these cases over patents acquired from Huawei still represent just a fraction of the top-filer's recent litigation activity, which has settled into a pattern of roughly 50 new suits per month. Sources of patents for the firm range from universities to individual inventors, operating companies to other NPEs.
IP Edge typically litigates in file-and-settle fashion, a pattern from which a late 2020 International Trade Commission complaint filed by Q3 Networking LLC was a notable departure. Just this month, the administrative law judge in that case returned a final initial determination of no violation of the former Siemens patents asserted in that investigation—for additional coverage of that developments, see "ALJ David P. Shaw Finds No Section 337 Violation in ITC Action Filed by IP Edge" (December 2021). (NETGEAR is one of the defendants/respondents in that campaign as well, along with CommScope and HP Enterprise (Aruba Networks).)
Prior top monetization firm IP Navigation Group, LLC (d/b/a IPNav) wound down operations when founder Erich Spangenberg "moved off" into 2014 to "do other things" thereafter (details here). Having been the director and vice president of Asia for IPNav in 2012-2013, Lillian Woung created IP Edge in the wake of that move, with fellow Texas attorneys Gautham (Gau) Bodepudi and Sanjay Pant, first in Nevada and later merging into Texas. The firm has been the top filer of NPE cases over the years since, having initiated over 170 litigation campaigns in total, both right before and of course after its move to Texas and hitting thousands of defendants in the process.
Jade Licensing's suit against Brocade has been assigned to District Judge Alan D. Albright. 11/30, Western District of Texas.
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