In a burst of new filings, Honeyman Cipher Solutions LLC has sued six defendants across three districts: Adidas (1:20-cv-00401), ASICS Digital (1:20-cv-00402), Evernote (1:20-cv-00403), and PayPal (1:20-cv-00404) in the Western District of Texas; Asana (3:20-cv-00928) in the Northern District of Texas; and Slack (1:20-cv-01076) in the District of Colorado. As with its last complaints, filed separately in the District of Delaware against LogMeIn and Snap, infringement allegations focus on the defendants' use of Apple's iTunes Connect and Google's Android Developer Console to register and distribute their iOS and Android apps. There is a history of challenges to those allegations.

Litigation of the sole patent asserted in the new complaints (5,991,399) reaches back (to June 2015) to a prior plaintiff, Bradley D. Liddle's Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC (PET). Prior defendant Groupon challenged infringement allegations of the '399 patent against it, initially in Texas in the last case brought by PET and then in Northern District of Illinois in the first case brought by Honeyman. RPX previously provided a fuller treatment of those challenges, which argue that the patentholder's theory of infringement would have defendants distributing their private encryption keys, which, so Groupon argued, would be nonsensical "because doing so would be the functional equivalent of an individual publishing their own bank account PIN number or social security number for all the world to see (and potentially misuse)". Honeyman opposed Groupon's motion-itself arguing that when the construction of the term "including", subject to an existing Markman order in Texas, is properly applied, "the asserted claims [of the '399 patent] do not require the Groupon App to share or distribute a private key in the manner suggested".

Multiple continuances prevented resolution of Groupon's motion in Illinois, and each of the LogMeIn and Snap cases ended in Delaware before an answer was filed in either case, much less before any substantive litigation occurred.

The '599 patent issued to Intel in November 1999 with an estimated priority date in December 1997. PET acquired it, together with three other former Intel patents, from H2 Partners LLC, a Connecticut company controlled by financial manager Roger M. Harris, in March 2015. In January 2001, Intel had assigned the patents to Convera, a new entity spun off from its main business, which assigned them to H2 Partners in January 2011. PET assigned those four patents in early March 2019 to Honeyman Cipher, a Delaware entity formed in October 2018.

That assignment appears to be part of a larger pattern of patent transfers involving plaintiffs associated with Texas attorney Liddle (long identified as PET's CEO, as well as the CEO and general counsel for Personal Audio, LLC and more recently, since October 2019, identifying himself as a partner at Dallas, Texas law firm Carter Arnett PLLC), some of which have passed the patents that they had been litigating back to Delaware entities from which they had acquired the patents in the first place. For example, in October 2018, Cumberland Systems, LLC handed its patents back to Universal Cipher LLC, while Spider Search Analytics LLC assigned its patents back to Recursive Web Technologies LLC. (While PET has identified Delaware entity Koba Holdings, LLC as its corporate parent, it received its patents directly from either H2 Partners or the individual inventor of the other two patents that it held at one time.) The trend continued through 2019-see, for example, this March 2019 transfer from Wireless Monitoring Systems LLC back to Circuit Ventures LLC and this August 2019 assignment from Beck Branch, LLC back to Protocol Conversion Solutions LLC.

In early April, the full Federal Circuit refused to revisit the January 2020 decision of one of its panels affirming the dismissal of Personal Audio's case against CBS from the Eastern District of Texas after the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) cancelled as unpatentable claims at the heart of an earlier jury verdict in Personal Audio's favor in the district (awarding Personal Audio $1.3M). In January, that panel noted that the "exclusive avenue" for review of the PTAB's final written decision was a direct appeal and that, "[t]o the extent that Personal Audio challenges the district court's determination of the consequences of the affirmed final written decision for the proper disposition of this case, Personal Audio conceded that governing precedent required judgment for CBS".

Different setbacks appear to have prompted the assignment pattern across Liddle's broader set of litigating entities-Texas NPEs passing patents back to Delaware entities. In May 2017, the US Supreme Court handed down its TC Heartland decision on proper venue in patent cases, and in December 2018, the Federal Circuit dealt a blow to PET's litigation in Texas. There, a different panel ruled that PET's letter-writing campaign into the Northern District of Texas was sufficient to ground jurisdiction for a declaratory judgment action brought against PET there. For a fuller consideration of that opinion and the accompanying shift in Liddle's litigation tactics, see "NPE's Filing Pattern in Sudden Reverse as Federal Circuit Holds That Letter-Writing Campaign Is Sufficient to Establish Venue" (May 2019).

Honeyman Cipher has disclosed that it has no parent corporation, and that no publicly held company owns ten percent or more of its stock. A one-page assessment of the entity's campaign can be downloaded from RPX Insight here. 4/16, Adidas, ASICS, Evernote, PayPal, Western District of Texas; 4/16, Slack, District of Colorado; 4/16, Asana, Northern District of Texas.

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