Patent Filings Roundup: Seven New Discretionary Denials; Magnetar Capital’s Next Big Thing

It was a light week at the Board and in the courts (relatively speaking), with 49 new district court patent filings and 19 inter partes reviews (IPRs), both a bit less than recent averages. There were another 72 district court dismissals, including a number of WSOU, CallStat [Jeffrey Gross], and other file-and-settle entity dismissals filling up the docket. The Board issued seven new discretionary denials, discussed below, and the Apple/Ericsson 5G dispute continued to spill into the open in venues worldwide, with district court cases, IPRs, ITC, and European disputes filling out the docket. Magnetar filed another campaign in recent weeks and followed up with hitting Apple this week; a number of parties were denied institution against Express Mobile patents (though two of the five patents have been instituted, and more are pending on the others); and Vector Capital’s Monterey Research lost yet another set of claims in a challenge by AMD at the Board. A new stone-related NPE title, Marble VOIP Partners LLC, appears to be the most recent in a long line of groups spun off from the IBM sale to Daedalus Group LLC; and DynaIP’s action sped up this week, with a new filings in a couple of their campaigns. New semiconductor activity remained high, with multiple new entities and suits.

Magnetar’s Next Big Thing: It appears the Magnetar Capital Irish subsidiaries run through entity Atlantic IP—big-dollar litigations against the biggest names on the Fortune 500 list—all follow a similar pattern; identify a portfolio that covers a technology adjacent to or that reads on most personal electronic devices (whether charging, RF, chip-related, or otherwise), sue the biggest handset manufacturers (usually Samsung first, followed shortly thereafter by Apple, and then down the list) on a subset of the portfolio, and in the meantime exert licensing pressure on other entities, suppliers, potential infringers, and smaller device providers. Whether it’s making them money or not will be hard to tell, but in the instances where they’ve (at least arguably) lost or struggled in the first round of litigation (as with Neodron or Data Scape), they generally move on to other patents and continue to roll, almost like clockwork. Well, that’s happening again, this time with an entity called Speir Technologies, albeit with what appears to be a much smaller portfolio behind the campaign. They sued Samsung a few weeks ago, then Apple, and one would assume they are fanning out and rent-seeking among the rest of the industry as they exert public pressure through the courts (and, often, the ITC). The patents are related to wireless locating of devices, such as they are.

Board Issues Seven Discretionary Denials under 325(d): It was a big week for discretionary denials at the Board, with seven parties getting denied for 325(d) and other various reasons, including petitioners Trend Micro, Nespresso USA, and Atrium Medical. The various cases generally relied on art cited in prosecution or subsequent reexamination proceedings to deny institution; a few were related to cases that had earlier been denied on the merits.

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