Atlantic IP's Eireog Innovations Limited has filed a new Eastern District of Texas complaint against HP Enterprise (HPE) ( 2:24-cv-00279), asserting the same quad of former NXP patents at issue throughout its prior litigation. Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap already presides over previous cases there, filed separately against Cisco, Fortinet, IBM, Lenovo, and Palo Alto Networks. Eireog sued Dell over the same four patents earlier this month, but in the Western District of Texas. Targeted across the campaign, as well as in the new HPE complaint, is the provision of products, ranging from laptops to servers, that incorporate certain AMD and Intel CPUs.
Eireog Innovations was formed in Ireland as part of the broader monetization efforts of Dublin-based Atlantic IP, which has launched more than two dozen litigation campaigns in the US, typically over former operating company patents and with the backing of "investor" Magnetar Capital, a hedge fund reporting more than $13B of assets under management. HPE has been intentionally sued in one earlier Atlantic IP campaign, that of Lionra Technologies Limited, running from August 2022 through March 2023. (Before that, Atlantic IP's Neodrón Limited named HPE as a proposed respondent in an original complaint before the International Trade Commission but quickly swapped out HPE for HP Inc. Neodrón had also sued HPE in a parallel district court complaint, but that appears to reflect the same oversight.)
That Lionra litigation followed the first transfer of patent assets from HPE to Atlantic IP. In April 2020, HPE assigned a portfolio of 17 patents to the firm's Sonraí Memory Limited; Sonraí Memory then passed five of those patents to sister entity Foras Technologies Limited in January 2022 and another two to it in April 2023. The next month, Foras launched an automotive campaign that has since expanded to tag automaker defendants BMW, Kia, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen, as well as others operating in the industry, including Aptiv, DENSO, HL Klemove, Robert Bosch, Valeo, and Zeppelin-Stiftung (ZF Friedrichshafen).
Shortly after the Lionra case against HPE was dismissed with prejudice in March 2023, in the wake of the parties' notification there that they had "resolved plaintiff's claims for relief against HPE asserted in this case", HPE transferred additional patents to Atlantic IP, moving six patents to Lionra and one more to Sonraí, in assignments dated March 30, 2023 (and recorded the next day). Lionra immediately put that newly received portfolio to work, accusing Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks of infringing patents from it. Later complaints added Broadcom (VMware) and CrowdStrike to the litigation, but those suits have since closed.
As noted, Eireog now asserts four patents (8,117,399; 8,504,777; 9,436,626; 9,442,870) against each of the defendants in its campaign. The patents were acquired through an early November 2023 assignment from NXP of 11 patents, recorded this past December. For additional information concerning the patents, see "Eireog Innovations Follows Up Campaign Launch by Suing Lenovo" (April 2024). 4/25, Eastern District of Texas.
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