VoIP-Pal.com Inc. (VPLM) has filed separate Western District of Texas lawsuits against a mostly familiar set of defendants—Alphabet (Google) (6:21-cv-00667), Amazon (6:21-cv-00668), Apple (6:21-cv-00670), AT&T (6:21-cv-00671), Facebook (6:21-cv-00665), T-Mobile (6:21-cv-00674), and Verizon (6:21-cv-00672)—asserting a family of two patents new to litigation. The publicly traded NPE describes the patents as describing "systems, apparatuses and methods for providing an access code to roaming mobile communication devices such as smartphones, to enable access to suitable communication routing infrastructure, wherein the selection of the communication channel for a call can be optimized based on the calling device's current location", with infringement allegations targeting the "calling systems" of each defendant, comprised of servers and a host of interconnected devices. VPLM's first campaign is a somewhat storied affair, in various district courts as well as before the PTAB.
The patents newly asserted (8,630,234; 10,880,721) form a two-patent family with grant dates in January 2014 and December 2020, respectively, and with estimated priority dating back to July 2008. The original development work for the family, like the family asserted in VPLM's first campaign, was conducted at Digifonica, characterized in the new complaints as having "spent over $15,000,000 researching, developing, and testing a communication solution capable of seamlessly integrating a private voice-over-IP ("VoIP") communication network with an external network (i.e., the "public switched telephone network" or "PSTN"), by bridging the disparate protocols, destination identifiers and addressing schemes used in the two networks".
That first campaign has followed a winding path from its February 2016 start to present day, including multiple venue transfers, Alice invalidations, Federal Circuit appeals, and declaratory judgment actions, as well as eye-popping early damages estimates and a parallel and tumultuous turn before the PTAB. To dig into those events, as well as for an entry point into VPLM, its executives, and recent financials, see "Per New Complaint, VoIP-Pal.com Offered to Pay Twitter if Twitter Would Dismiss Its DJ Action" (April 2021). In some of its new complaints, VPLM pleads willfulness based on, among other things, the fact that the "parties have engaged in multiple settlement discussions concerning VoIP-Pal's patent portfolio", including the new patents-in-suit, and via those interactions, some of the defendants have "acquired intimate knowledge of VoIP-Pal's patent portfolio and its infringement of that portfolio".
The cases in this campaign have all been filed in the Western District of Texas, where others suits from the first campaign remain active, although the District of Nevada kicked the larger disputes off, to be replaced (via transfers) by the Northern District of California. 6/25, Western District of Texas.
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