IP Edge LLC affiliate Anuwave LLC has rebooted its litigation campaign with a new round of filings, shifting application of the sole text messaging patent-in-suit from the provision of mobile banking services to the provision of "text security services"—i.e., security apps that locate a mobile device by sending it a text message from another device. The new complaints hit Avast (1:18-cv-00506), BitDefender (1:18-cv-00507), BullGuard (1:18-cv-00508), Symantec (1:18-cv-00509), Total Defense (1:18-cv-00510) and Webroot (1:18-cv-00511) in the District of Delaware and Sophos (1:18-cv-10655) in the District of Massachusetts, where prior defendants in the campaign, numbering close to 50, have typically been banks.
Anuwave began this campaign in November 2015, adding two rounds of cases each in 2016 and 2017. As has usually been the case for IP Edge campaigns, Anuwave's lawsuits have all been short-lived, with none lasting more than six months, the most recent case, against TCF Financial, stretching unremarkably from August 2017 to mid-February. Each complaint in the campaign has seen a single patent (8,295,862) asserted; the '862 patent issued in October 2012 to TeliBrahma, a Bangalore-based mobile communications company founded and run by the patent's named inventor, Suresh Narasimha. Along with several other TeliBrahma patents, the '862 patent was acquired in September 2014 by Allied Security Trust subsidiary Cactus Flower, which then assigned the '862 patent and its sole, unasserted family member (9,014,731) to Anuwave in October 2015.
IP Edge was formed in Texas in July 2015 by attorneys Gautham (Gau) Bodepudi, Sanjay Pant, and Lillian Woung. Its affiliates have litigated at least 60 campaigns both before (directly through its founders) and after its formation, including a dozen launched last year. However, the monetization firm appears to have initiated only one new campaign so far in 2018 (filed by Epic IP LLC over live chat engines).
In November 2017, Unified Patents filed a petition for inter partes review of the '862 patent (IPR2018-00223). RPX has published a prior art search report covering the '862 patent. For more information on these proceedings and the IP Edge campaign, visit RPX Insight.
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