- within Litigation and Mediation & Arbitration topic(s)
Korean plaintiff NetLens Technologies Inc. has filed a Western District of Texas case against Microsoft (7:25-cv-00311). A single patent broadly directed to "obtaining diagnostic information at a selected time in a virtual environment" is asserted. NetLens targets the provision of products that "are, have, use, or require virtual instances and service managers" such as "Microsoft Azure, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Monitor, Azure Monitor Agent, Azure Kubernetes Service ('AKS'), Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Azure VMware Solution, Hyper-V, Data Science Virtual Machine, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, BizTalk Server, [and] Dynamics AX".
Comprising a family of one, the patent-in-suit (8,910,154) issued to Mitel Networks in December 2014 with estimated priority in December 2010. Its named inventors are Don Arscott, identified on social media as a having been a "Senior Full Stack Software Developer" with Mitel since 2000, and Michael Yeung. A Michael Yeung is identified on social media as a "Solution Architect / ITSM Consultant", with last noted employment situation, at HP Enterprise, ending in 2013. Acquired by Searchlight Capital Partners in 2018, Mitel announced earlier this year that it had entered bankruptcy. It assigned the '154 patent to RingCentral in January 2022, apparently as part of a "strategic partnership" between the two companies.
NetLens Technologies pleads that it was formed in Korea. In court disclosures, it pleads that Hipe IP Inc. is its "parent corporation". Hipe IP describes itself on its website as providing "Intellectual Property Consulting", "Intellectual Property Sale Brokerage", "Patent Monetization", and "R&D-based IP creation and licensing" services. Hipe received the '154 patent from RingCentral in August 2024, moving it to NetLens Technologies in June 2025. Jinhyun Shin signed for Hipe, as the entity's CEO. On social media, Shin identifies himself as having been the cofounder of "HIPE IP" since November 2023. He lists prior employment as a patent attorney in Korea, including one from July 2020 to August 2023 with Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd. (ID).
ID is a sovereign fund established by the government of Korea in 2010. Other US litigation under the ID umbrella has been filed by entities held by Golden Wave Partners Co., Ltd., including still-active efforts from KAIFI LLC (filed last July against Amazon, coverage here) and TS-Optics Corporation (last September, against Microsoft, here). An ID/Golden Wave campaign filed in March 2023 by Wireless Alliance, LLC (which received funding from Longford Capital) against AT&T (AT&T Mobility), Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), and Verizon (Verizon Wireless) ended this past December after settlements were noticed.
A fuller consideration of the connections between Golden Wave and ID, as well as their ties to South Korean research institution Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), can be found here. More recently, Texas entity SiliconArts Technology US Inc., an ID subsidiary, initiated its first litigation, suing BOXX Technologies and NVIDIA in separate Western District of Texas complaints. See "New Intellectual Discovery Campaign Targets GPUs" (March 2025) for coverage.
RingCentral has divested patents to an NPE before, including the assignment of a single VoIP patent to Croga Innovations Limited, an Atlantic IP Services plaintiff, in December 2023. RingCentral had acquired that patent earlier, from AT&T. Croga has been litigating a campaign, initially over that patent and others, since December 2023. (Croga initially asserted the patent received from RingCentral, against only Cisco among the five defendants, but the parties later stipulated to a dismissal of that patent from the case.)
In apparent defensive pleading against an Alice challenge, NetLens contends that "the problem of comprehensively diagnosing a virtual environment, particularly virtual instances, and troubleshooting issues therein are inherently rooted in computer technology with no non-technological analog, nor can the solution be performed solely within the human mind". Hecht Partners filed the new complaint for NetLens. The case has been assigned to District Judge Alan D. Albright. 7/14, Western District of Texas.
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