August 18, 2024
In late July, AGIS Holdings Inc. plaintiff AGIS Software Development LLC (ASD) separately sued AT&T (AT&T Mobility), GPSWOX and UAB Mr Digital, L3 Harris Technologies, Motorola Solutions, and RTX (Raytheon Technologies), all in the Eastern District of Texas. Now, ASD has continued this wave of new litigation, adding complaints filed in the same district against Acer (2:24-cv-00660), Dell (2:24-cv-00662), HP and HP Enterprise (HPE) (2:24-cv-00663, sued in a single complaint), and Lenovo (2:24-cv-00666). The five patents-in-suit are familiar; they are among now 13 that have been asserted across the decade that this campaign has been up and running.
Those patents (8,213,970; 9,445,251; 9,467,838; 9,749,829; 9,820,123) generally relate to various aspects of mobile messaging and location sharing. They belong to a family of 23 with issue dates ranging from April 2006 through June 2024 and a shared estimated priority date in September 2004. Prosecution of multiple related applications continues before the USPTO. Each of the patents identifies AGIS Holdings's founder, CEO, and chairman Malcolm K. Beyer Jr. as an inventor, with some of the patents also naming inventor Christopher R. Rice (of uncertain connection to Beyer) as a named inventor. The patents have seen both inter partes reviews (IPR) and ex parte reexamination (EPR), with the alleged results recounted throughout each new complaint.
Advanced Ground Information Systems, Inc. (AGIS), another AGIS Holdings subsidiary, initiated this litigation campaign in May 2014 with a suit against Life360. ASD, formed in Texas in June 2017, took over the campaign in the month of its formation and has since sued roughly 30 defendants—including Alphabet (Google, Waze), Apple, HTC, Huawei, LG Electronics (LGE), Lyft, MetaPlatforms (WhatsApp), OnePlus, Samsung, Uber, Verizon, and ZTE. Several of those defendants were also named as proposed respondents in a November 2022 complaint filed by ASD and AGIS with the International Trade Commission (ITC); the complaint was withdrawn and the investigation terminated in July 2023.
Lenovo is among those prior defendants, sued in November 2022 over the same five patents asserted in the new complaint. A February 20, 2024 notice of dismissal with prejudice in that case, after little other activity, indicated that the dismissal had been filed "based on a settlement agreement between AGIS and third-party Google LLC", but the next day a "corrected notice" was filed paring things down to a simple statement of voluntary dismissal with prejudice. From the earlier waves of litigation, only the January 2021 declaratory judgment action filed by Lyft—which has been stayed to await the outcome of various ex parte reexaminations and inter partes review (IPR) proceedings—remains "active". (A consolidated Eastern District of Texas suit against ASUSTek, HMD, Panasonic, and Sony is still formally open, but litigation against each defendant appears to have ended, with indications on that docket also suggesting that a resolution with Google rippled through this campaign, ending myriad cases.)
For RPX coverage of this campaign, as well as a detailed treatment of AGIS and ASD's management, see "AGIS Campaign Accelerates, Turns to ITC" (November 2022). Public records confirm that ASD has received funding from litigation finance firm Longford Capital Management. Founded in 2013 and based in Chicago, Longford has provided funding to a long list of patent plaintiffs over the last several years, including BillJCo LLC; G+ Communications, LLC; Jawbone Innovations, LLC; MemoryWeb LLC; Proven Networks, LLC; RFCyber Corp.; and Truesight Communications LLC. For an overview of Longford's activities in the patent space, see here.
Each of these new defendants is targeted the provision of software products with various features related to forming groups or networks within which users can share location information and engage in communications; forming groups for controlling, tracking, and/or sending/receiving information from lost or stolen devices; forming groups allowing users to remotely track or control each other's devices; and making voice calls (for all defendants, the Microsoft Family Safety app, the built-in Windows Find My Device feature, and third-party products from Absolute Software, while the HP/HPE complaint additionally tags the HP Wolf Protect and Trace product). Dell, HP and HPE, and Lenovo are also targeted over the provision of various computers running Windows "from 2017 to present" (with each of those three complaints confusingly including Chromebooks, which would presumably run Chrome OS, in that list of purported Windows products.
The complaint against HP and HPE provides little justification for the combined complaint, other than the statement that "Defendants directly and/or indirectly develop, design, manufacture, distribute, market, offer for sale, and/or sell infringing products and services in the United States, including in the Eastern District of Texas, and otherwise direct infringing activities to this District in connection with their products and services". The cases have been again assigned to Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap; Fabricant LLP and Truelove Law Firm, PLLC represent the plaintiff in this litigation. 8/13, Eastern District of Texas.
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