Defendant
8 cases as defendant.
Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC (PET) is a Texas limited liability company formed in March 2015 and based at 903 E. 18th Street, Suite 224, Plano, Texas. It is a subsidiary of Koba Holdings, LLC, a Delaware entity. No public revenue or headcount figures are available; RPX reported in 2016 that PET's only employee and officer was Bradley D. Liddle, who served as CEO and corporate counsel. It is characterized as a non-practicing entity (NPE) by Stanford's NPE Litigation Database, Unified Patents, and RPX. PET is not public and has no disclosed parent other than Koba Holdings.
Operations. PET has no operating business, products, or services. Its sole activity is licensing and litigating a small acquired patent portfolio. USPTO records indicate it owned at least six patents, four of which originated at Intel; PET acquired four former Intel patents from H2 Partners LLC in March 2015. The asserted patents include U.S. 5,991,399 ("securely distributing data"/tamper-resistant key modules), 5,974,550 (remote security protocol using challenge-response authentication), and 6,587,858. Claims were directed at secure distribution of private keys and authentication between processes.
Litigation posture. PET is a one-way patent asserter: 23 tracked cases as plaintiff versus 10 as defendant. The defendant-side cases are declaratory-judgment actions brought by targets — Jack Henry & Associates, Fidelity National Information Services, Broadway National Bank, and The National Bank of Central Texas — a common defensive response to NPE demand letters. Filings cluster in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, with a second wave in 2016 against general consumer mobile-app operators.
Notable cases. The 2015 wave targeted banks and mobile-banking vendors (including Q2 Holdings, Independent Bank, American Bank of Texas); the 2016 wave named State Farm, J.C. Penney, Groupon, Match.com, Shutterfly, Best Buy, Etsy, and Alkami. State Farm petitioned for inter partes review of the '550 and '399 patents in 2017; the parties settled and dismissed without payment, after a summary judgment of non-infringement on the '550 patent. In early 2019 PET assigned four patents to Honeyman Cipher, a Delaware entity formed in October 2018, which continued the campaign.
State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company filed an IPR against Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC challenging US 5,991,399. The proceeding was terminated by settlement.
Broadway National Bank filed a declaratory judgment action against Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC seeking non-infringement of US 5,991,399, US 5,974,550, and US 6,587,858.
Declaratory judgment action against Plano Encryption Technologies; dismissed/terminated on venue grounds.
Jack Henry & Associates, Inc., et al., including 11 Texas banks with Jack Henry as indemnitor, filed a declaratory judgment action against Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC. The case was dismissed for lack of venue, but the Federal Circuit reversed and remanded.
Fidelity National Information Services, Inc., et al. filed a declaratory judgment action against Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC. The case was dismissed.
Declaratory judgment action against Plano Encryption Technologies and Koba Holdings. Defendants moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and failure to state a claim; record lists case as CLOSED.
National Bank d/b/a The National Bank of Central Texas filed a declaratory judgment action against Plano Encryption Technologies, LLC.
Declaratory judgment action filed by National Bank against Plano Encryption Technologies in the PET campaign involving U.S. 5,974,550.