In the summer of 2015, publicly traded NPE ITUS Corporation, announced executive changes and a new focus for the company's future business: cancer diagnostics. This past November, ITUS continued its apparent pivot away from patent assertion, forming a new subsidiary to develop "immuno-therapy drugs against cancer", revealing an initial focus on ovarian cancer, and indicating that the company will remain engaged in "limited patent licensing activities in the area of encrypted audio/video conference calling" only as part of its "legacy operations", which would not "require material financial resources or attention of senior management". Nevertheless, this past week, ITUS subsidiary Meetrix IP, LLC filed separate lawsuits against Cisco (1:18-cv-00309) and Microsoft (1:18-cv-00310), targeting the defendants' WebEx and Skype (and Skype for Business) products, respectively, each with patents from its "encrypted audio/video conference calling" portfolio.
Settlement and dismissal (with prejudice) in a September 2016 case against Citrix ended Meetrix IP's first wave of suits in this campaign, which also included LogMeIn and Polycom, both of which were dismissed in July 2017. The NPE has asserted the same set of patents (8,339,997; 9,094,525; 9,253,332) against each defendant, adding a fourth patent asserted against Cisco and Microsoft (9,843,612); a hearing to construe disputed claim terms from the first three patents, before Judge Lee Yeakel in the Western District of Texas, was held in September 2017. No resulting order issued. In its recent annual report, ITUS disclosed that at the end of its 2017 fiscal year (on October 31) it had "recorded revenue of approximately $363,000 from one license agreement".
That same fiscal year saw an operating loss for the company of roughly $6M. ITUS notes that due to its dramatic shift in strategy, together with $12M raised "through multiple financing arrangements, including a shareholder rights offering, a registered direct offering, and an at-the-market equity offering, and satisfied debt obligations through payments of cash and common stock", as of October 31, 2017, it had no "significant" debt and had "approximately $6.8 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments". So armed, ITUS reported its belief that it had "alleviated substantial doubt about [its] ability to continue as a going concern".
Meetrix IP's patents-in-suit issued between December 2012 and February 2016. Rights in them, either as patents or ongoing applications, were transferred in November 2013 from Meetrix Communications, Inc. (a Delaware company formed in July 2010) to Meetrix IP, which was formed by ITUS's CEO at the time, Robert Berman, in Texas in October 2014 under the name VPN Multicast Technologies LLC. Ten months before that sale to ITUS of its patents, Meetrix Communications announced a planned collaboration with Polycom to provide a unified communications platform. (Meetrix's lawsuit against Polycom alleged that that defendant knew of the patents-in-suit as early as 2013, when they were allegedly offered to Polycom for purchase.)
At the time of original publication, ITUS shares were trading (on the NASDAQ) at $4.60 per share, down from its peak over the past year but up over its twelve-month average.
For more information on ITUS and Meetrix, visit RPX Insight.
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