Black Swamp IP, LLC

Black Swamp IP, LLC is a limited liability company with a business address of c/o John W. McMahon, 316 N. Michigan Street, Suite 600, Toledo, Ohio 43604. Its members are two trusts — the Stoneledge Trust (sole trustee David B. Colon) and the Rockwood Trust (sole trustee John W. McMahon) — who signed the company's PTAB powers of attorney. In briefing filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Black Swamp stated it "has no parent corporation" and that no publicly held corporation owns 10% or more of its stock. No employee count, revenue figure, founding date, or product line is disclosed in any public source reviewed; the entity appears to have been formed for the purpose of filing patent challenges and has no verifiable operations.

Black Swamp does not make, sell, or license anything, and it does not appear to own an asserted patent portfolio. It is best characterized not as a classic non-practicing entity asserting patents, but as a shell petitioner that files inter partes review petitions against other companies' patents — the same pattern commentators have identified for New Bay Capital LLC. Foley & Lardner (National Law Review, March 2016) noted that "the value of the potential damages awards appears to have attracted investor interest, such as the IPR petitions filed by New Bay Capital LLC and Black Swamp IP, LLC," and reported that Black Swamp asserted the same Kiuchi anticipation ground Microsoft had earlier used against the same patent. Counsel of record is Martin & Ferraro LLP of Hartville, Ohio.

The structured case data is consistent with that characterization: one tracked case, as plaintiff, zero as defendant, all at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board — no district court suits, and therefore no Eastern District of Texas venue history. Its tracked matter is Black Swamp IP, LLC v. VirnetX Inc. (PTAB, 2016), an IPR against VirnetX's internet-security patents.

Publicly documented related filings by Black Swamp challenged VirnetX U.S. Patents 7,490,151, 7,418,504 and 7,921,211. It was joined to Mangrove Partners Master Fund's IPR2015-01047 (joinder granted Feb. 4, 2016); the Board's final decisions in IPR2016-00693 and IPR2016-00957 found the challenged claims unpatentable. Black Swamp declined to participate in the subsequent Federal Circuit appeals (Oct. 18, 2017), where the USPTO intervened; the 2023 Federal Circuit decision in VirnetX v. Mangrove Partners affirmed invalidity, mooting a $502 million Apple verdict.