Texas Secure Authentication, LLC has sued a second bank in the Western District of Texas. Last November the inventor-controlled plaintiff hit FCT Bancshares (First National Bank of Central Texas) with a single patent generally related to determining identification through multiple information containers and registers. Little happened through dismissal of that case, without prejudice, in early June 2021; now, Texas Secure has sued Cullen/Frost Bankers (Frost Bank) (6:21-cv-01069) over the same patent, with infringement allegations again targeting the use of multi-factor authentication methods in online banking and Internet services.
The patent-in-suit (7,873,682) issued in January 2011 as the third member of a family (7,010,536, 7,702,682) with earliest estimated priority date in January 1998, based on the filing of a provisional application. Each patent names Michael De Angelo as its sole inventor. Ownership rights of the patent family have moved through a series of entities, formed in various states by De Angelo, including Ematrix Corporation; Pattern Intelligence, Inc.; Incandescent, Inc.; and Evolutionary Intelligence LLC (of which Incandescent was, at least as of mid-2019, the parent company); IICR, Inc.; and Texas Secure (roughly in that order).
While in the hands of Evolutionary Intelligence, in October 2012, that entity filed suit in the Eastern District of Texas against Apple, Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, LivingSocial, Millienial Media, Sprint, Twitter, and Yelp, asserting both the '536 and '682 patents. The cases were transferred to the Northern District of California and stayed in light of multiple inter partes reviews of the patents, by which time the US Supreme Court had issued its Alice patent eligibility decision, in June 2014. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board denied institution of trial as to most of the petitions filed, proceeding with only one review, of certain claims from the '536 patent, the patentability of which was ultimately upheld in an April 2015 final written decision.
Once the stay was lifted, though, in response to motions for judgment on the pleadings, District Judge Ronald M. Whyte invalidated all claims from both patents as patent ineligibly directed at the abstract ideas of "containerized data storage utilizing rules and instructions" (the '536 patent) and "searching and processing containerized data" (the '682 patent). The Federal Circuit affirmed, both a full-court rehearing and US Supreme Court appeal were denied, and District Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton (back in the Northern District of California) dashed Evolutionary Intelligence's hope for relief from Judge Whyte's judgment in light of the Federal Circuit's early 2018 Berkheimer and Aatrix decisions, concluding that the opinions "do not constitute an intervening change of law sufficient to support . . . the reopening of a final judgment".
In January 2019, De Angelo moved the '3,682 patent (together with an unrelated patent on which he is also the sole named inventor) in a faulty assignment from Evolutionary Intelligence to IICR, a Wyoming entity, correcting the transfer in July 2020. A week after that correction, just the '3,682 patent was passed to Texas Secure, which had been formed in Texas, on July 9, 2020. Texas Secure acknowledges in its complaints that the '3,682 patent expired in February 2019.
Texas Secure is represented by The Mort Law Firm, PLLC. The new case has been assigned to District Judge Alan D. Albright. 10/14, Western District of Texas.
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