Last year saw publicly traded Acacia Research Corporation amass a sizeable stockpile of patents, with CIO Al Tobia Jr., in a November 2020 earnings call, declaring that Acacia's "IP team has been hard at work with our four previously acquired portfolios and we are on track to deliver the returns that we anticipated when we acquired these assets earlier this year and late last year". Here, at the end of January, the company has kicked off the new year with litigation from that stockpile, both R2 Solutions LLC and Stingray IP Solutions LLC launching Acacia's first new campaigns since last June.
R2 Solutions and the Excalibur IP Acquisition
Acacia's R2 Solutions has filed separate Eastern District of Texas lawsuits against Deezer (4:21-cv-00090), Samsung (4:21-cv-00089), Target (4:21-cv-00092), WalMart (4:21-cv-00091), and Workday (4:21-cv-00093), accusing each of infringing overlapping subsets of seven (7,610,277; 7,698,329; 8,190,610; 8,209,317; 8,307,029; 8,341,157; 9,928,279) from among the roughly 2,500 former Yahoo patents that Acacia acquired last year through Excalibur IP, LLC.
The new complaints recount, in brief, Yahoo's early history, from its founding "as a hobby" of two Stanford graduate students through the company's deployment of its own web crawler, Slurp, in 2004, after having used Google's engine previously: "The patents-in-suit relate to innovations associated with Yahoo! Search that were developed and implemented during this period, which enabled Yahoo! to become Google's biggest competitor in the search engine space".
R2 Solutions asserts the '610 patent (generally related to distributed database processing) and the '157 patent (to search query processing and results presentation) against all of the defendants but Samsung. Each is accused of infringing the '610 patent through the provision of a system (e.g., "the Target data analytics system") built on open-source software Apache Hadoop, while search operations associated with the defendants' respective apps/websites (e.g., "the Deezer Music application") are the target of R2 Solutions infringement allegations with respect to the '157 patent. For three of those defendants, Deezer, Target, and WalMart, those same operations are the accused products with respect to the '329 patent (also generally related to search processing).
Deezer and Samsung are both accused of infringing the '317 patent, broadly directed to search query "reconstruction": Deezer through provision of its Music app and Samsung, provision of its digital assistant "Bixby infrastructure". Deezer alone is further accused of infringing the '279 patent (generally related to media streaming), again through provision of its Music app, while Samsung alone is accused of infringing both the '277 patent (generally related to browser launch), through provision of certain smartphones (e.g., identified Galaxy Fold, Note, S models) equipped with Samsung Bixby, and the '029 patent (generally related to networked communications based on, among other things, "at least one real world entity"), through provision of its SmartThings smart home system.
RPX Insight provides a visual display of these overlapping patent assertions for the R2 Solutions campaign. Acacia acquired Excalibur IP in the second quarter of last year, the portfolio subject to an earlier RPX transaction.
R2 Solutions was formed in Texas in May 2016, with Paul Reidy identified as its managing member from formation through the company's last filing (in April 2020, an amendment signed by Marc Booth, an Acacia executive); however, Reidy, a veteran of Freescale Semiconductor (later acquired by NXP), Intellectual Ventures LLC (IV), and RPX, reports on social media that his role as president of Excalibur IP ended in June 2020 (shortly after Acacia completed the acquisition).
Stingray IP Solutions and the L3Harris Acquisition
Meanwhile, last week Acacia's Stingray IP Solutions LLC also hit Samsung (2:21-cv-00025), again in the Eastern District of Texas, charging the tech giant with infringement of four patents (6,958,986; 6,961,310; 6,980,537; 7,027,426) picked up from Harris Corporation (now L3Harris after the 2019 merger with L3 Technologies). Acacia describes that portfolio as comprised of nearly 150 US patents "covering commercial applications of Wi-Fi and IoT technologies". Stingray IP pleads that the asserted patents "cover wireless communication methods that are incorporated into ZigBee and Z-Wave protocols and the products that utilize them, such as Samsung's IoT and smart home devices, their components, and processes related to the same".
The '986 patent belongs to a family of ten (all now held by Stingray IP, at least according to publicly available USPTO assignment records), while each of the other three patents comprises a single-member family. Each concerns aspects of wireless communications, in "ad hoc networks" and/or across multiple "mobile nodes". Stingray's recorded patent holdings, which currently number just north of 100, can be viewed on RPX Insight.
Acacia's Continued Resurgence
Acacia has been acquiring and litigating patents for more than 20 years, with a lull in activity preceding a shakeup, begun in 2018, when activist investors Sidus Investment Management and BLR Partners LP changed the company's leadership. The board of directors and top executives were overhauled, with Clifford Press (cofounder of the investment company Hyde Park Holdings) named as its CEO and Tobia (cofounder of Sidus Investment Management) as its CIO after they were placed on the board. A strategic shift—initially characterized as an "absolute return asset management strategy" followed, part of which has been accelerating patent portfolio acquisition and assertion.
That acceleration continued through Acacia's partnership with hedge fund Starboard Value, opening up access to up to $500M in new capital with which the company acquired several notable portfolios in 2019-2020 (see here and here). Last year also saw Acacia launch five new litigation campaigns, all in the first half: two through Monarch Networking Solutions LLC (one targeting Charter Communications and Cisco with former France Telecom/Orange SA patents) and another hitting Cisco again, this time over a patent acquired from Siemens); and one each through ID Image Sensing LLC (targeting Omnivision with an image sensing patent with roots at Agilent, HP's semiconductor division); Semiconductor Connections LLC (a single case accusing TSMC of infringing a single semiconductor fabrication patent of Fraunhofer vintage); and Unification Technologies LLC (targeting solid-state drives of HP, Dell, and Micron Technology with several patents originally developed at Fusion-IO, later acquired by SanDisk, itself later acquired by Western Digital).
Last year Acacia also continued litigating in prior campaigns, several of which remain open and active, as do each of the campaigns that it initiated in 2020. More assertion, through litigation or otherwise, is likely coming. As noted, the company has acquired several portfolios yet to appear in court, and on January 8, 2021, it formed Video Enhancement Solutions LLC in Texas. A couple of years ago the old leadership voluntarily dissolved a Texas entity of the exact same name, "Video Enhancement Solutions LLC". That LLC held a portfolio of former LG Electronics (LGE) video compression patents, litigating two of them between 2009 and 2011 against a large number of companies for their alleged use of DivX compression techniques. That campaign ended in a string of dismissals from the Central District of California just ahead of claim construction, and the portfolio was returned to LGE shortly thereafter, in a September 2012 transaction. It would appear, however, that 2021 may see yet another "video enhancement" campaign from Acacia.
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