USPTO records reflect an early June assignment by Daedalus Group LLC, placing a subset of the hundreds of US assets it received from IBM last year into the hands of another, apparently unrelated NPE. The transaction closely followed the launch of a third NPE campaign to arise from those divested IBM assets.
On June 2, Daedalus Group assigned 30 US assets to Ginegar LLC, formed in California on May 5. That state's public records link Ginegar to K.Mizra LLC (identified as the latter's entity's manager), an NPE that over the past year has received patents from Brian Yates (see here) but that has not filed any litigation to date.
K.Mizra was formed in Delaware in June 2019. In California (where K.Mizra filed as a foreign entity), attorney Charles Jourdan Hausman is identified as the NPE's sole managing member. K.Mizra's business is also described as "buy & license out patents" in corporate filings there, which provide a residential address in Los Angeles for the NPE.
On social media, "Chuck" Hausman holds himself out as the chief licensing officer at K.Mizra since July of last year; the chief licensing officer with Netlist, a company that "designs, manufactures, and sells modular memory subsystems", from October 2018 to June 2019; "President Sisvel US", from October 2015 to 2018; a "World Wide Program Manager" with One Red, "a joint patent licensing pool offered by Sony, Pioneer, LG, and Philips"; and director and senior intellectual property counsel at Philips, from 2006 to 2012.
According to USPTO records, in September 2019, IBM divested over 500 US patent assets, as well as a number of foreign counterparts in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, to Daedalus Group-an entity formed in Delaware the prior May. Daedalus Group-as well as Daedalus Blue LLC-is controlled by Ed Gomez, who reports several past positions in the IP industry, including chief patent counsel and general counsel for Walker Innovation Inc.; managing director and general counsel for Altitude Capital Partners; and chief IP counsel for General Patent Corporation. He has also been identified as the general counsel for Fullbrite Capital Partners, LLC (formed in Michigan in December 2017), the corporate parent of Vantage Micro LLC, an NPE that has been litigating several former AMD/ATI Technologies patents since last year.
While Daedalus Group has not filed any patent litigation to date, Daedalus Blue has brought two separate suits asserting subsets of the patents received from IBM, most recently hitting Oracle (6:20-cv-00428) over the provision of various products related to enterprise access management, storage and backup, and virtualization. See here for more details.
In addition to the recent assignment to Ginegar, Daedalus Group has also handed off roughly 75 of the patent assets received from IBM to Slingshot IOT LLC, a Maryland entity that passed about a third of them along to Quartz Auto Technologies, LLC, another new Maryland entity. Both appear to be managed by York Eggleston and Keith Machen, as part of a growing web of assertion entities (see here for details). Quartz Auto then sued first Uber and then Lyft in February of this year over six of the patents received, contributing to the marked increase in litigation targeting the Automotive sector seen during the first half of 2020 (a closer look at which is available in RPX's recently published Q2 in Review).
Note that in USPTO records, the address provided for Ginegar is a Bronxville, New York address associated with Gomez and both Daedalus NPEs. However, all other public information about Ginegar and K.Mizra suggest that the June 2020 transaction constituted a change in ownership of the portfolio.
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