Defendant
2 cases as defendant.
Uniloc 2017 LLC is a Delaware limited liability company formed in 2017 as part of the Uniloc patent-licensing group. Its registered addresses include 1209 Orange Street, Wilmington, Delaware, and offices at 620 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach, California, and 102 N. College Avenue, Tyler, Texas. It is owned by CF Uniloc Holdings LLC and is a Fortress Investment Group affiliate; Fortress was acquired by SoftBank Group in 2017. No public ticker exists.
Operations. Uniloc 2017 is a non-practicing entity (NPE/PAE) with no products or services. It holds an acquired patent portfolio — Uniloc Luxembourg reportedly assigned roughly 600 patents to it, and Unified Patents and Stanford's NPE database both classify it as a patent assertion entity. Asserted technologies include VoIP/instant voice messaging, video encoding, device authentication, remote software updates, and automated telephone dialing. Fortress structured Uniloc 2017 to hold and assert these patents for licensing revenue.
Litigation posture. Uniloc 2017 is overwhelmingly a plaintiff-side asserter; in this tracked dataset it appears as plaintiff once and as defendant twice. The two "defendant" entries are not infringement defenses but Patent Trial and Appeal Board proceedings petitioned by LG Electronics (2017-09-11) and Facebook (2017-05-11), where it is the patent owner. The single plaintiff entry is its Federal Circuit appeal involving Facebook. Broader litigation has clustered in the Eastern District of Texas, a plaintiff-friendly venue.
Notable cases/context. Its '433 patent on instant VoIP messaging was challenged in Facebook IPR2017-01427/01428; the Federal Circuit affirmed unpatentability in Uniloc 2017 LLC v. Facebook Inc. (No. 19-1688, March 9, 2021), a precedential estoppel decision. Separately, Apple and Intel sued Fortress and Uniloc entities in N.D. Cal. (2019) alleging anticompetitive patent aggregation; Unified Patents invalidated several Uniloc-asserted patents, including U.S. 6,519,005 and 7,092,671.
LG filed an IPR petition identical in substance to Facebook's '1427/'1428 petitions and moved to join both Facebook IPRs. Google Patents lists the case as terminating in a Final Written Decision, and the Federal Circuit confirmed the consolidated Facebook/LG IPR found all challenged claims unpatentable.
Facebook and WhatsApp petitioned for IPR of the '433 patent, challenging claims 1-8. Consolidated with IPR2017-01428. The Board held all challenged claims unpatentable as obvious; Facebook was estopped as to claims 1-6 and 8 but permitted to proceed on claim 7. LG Electronics later joined.