Last week, RPX covered the June 2025 acquisition of a patent portfolio from Knapp Investment Co. Ltd. by PrivateTag Innovations LLC, which has now sued Samsung (2:25-cv-00732). In the Eastern District of Texas complaint, the plaintiff asserts five of its received assets, generally related to RFID security or making mobile point-of-service (POS) payments using a device, targeting the provision of Samsung Galaxy-series smartphones that include the Samsung Pay application, a part of the Samsung Wallet service. At issue are features such as EMV payment tokenization, wireless payments, and adding credit/debit cards.
PrivateTag Innovations was formed in Texas on May 20, 2025. It lists Aaric Eisenstein as its manager. On social media, Eisenstein identifies himself as the founder and managing member of relatively new Texas monetization firm ASE Monetization LLC since November 2023, overlapping in that position with various roles for Personalized Media Communications, LLC (PMC). (Eisenstein lists his most recent role with PMC as "VP Licensing Strategy".)
RPX recently covered the transfer of the bulk of PMC's 100-plus signal processing patent family to ContentNexus LLC, an entity created in New Mexico two days earlier. This family has a storied past. Little public information is available concerning the personnel, management, or intentions of ContentNexus, but it has been formed under a pattern established over the past year or so of entities operating under patent monetization professional Jeffrey M. Gross.
The asserted patents here (7,492,258; 7,952,481; 9,628,466; 10,164,959; 10,623,392) originated with Radiofy. On social media, Mehran Moshfeghi, a named inventor for patents transferred from Golba LLC to an entity linked to troubled Texas monetization firm IP Edge LLC, identifies a prior position with Radiofy, touting having there developed a patent portfolio in NFC, RFID, indoor wireless positioning, and secure wireless transactions, which portfolio was "sold to technology companies". One of the named inventors for the patents just transferred to PrivateTag Innovations, Kambiz Shoarinejad, dates his time with Radiofy to December 2004 through July 2005, characterizing that stint as involving "[i]ntellectual property development on RFID technology, including wireless networking of highly integrated readers".
Knapp Investment is a British Virgin Islands entity that has been collecting patents for more than ten years from large operating companies; smaller businesses, some of which have ceased operations; at least one university and one prominent research institution; inventor-controlled entities; IP advisory firms; and other NPEs, only a few of which had previously filed litigation. For more about Knapp, see "Longtime Patent Collector Shifts Gears" (December 2024). For additional coverage about what can be publicly gleaned about ASE Monetization's fledgling operations, see "Entities Separately Linked to Three Texas Firms Acquire Patent Portfolios" (July 2025).
Kent & Risley, LLC filed the case against Samsung for PrivateTag. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap has been assigned to preside. 7/21, Eastern District of Texas.
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