Plaintiff
7 cases as plaintiff.
Intellectual Ventures I LLC is one of the primary legal entities used by Intellectual Ventures Management, LLC, a private firm founded in 2000. The parent company, headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, was co-founded by former Microsoft executives Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung. While the broader Intellectual Ventures organization employs researchers and inventors in a lab division, its primary business model centers on acquiring patents and monetizing them through licensing campaigns and litigation. It is considered one of the world's largest patent aggregators and has been frequently characterized as a non-practicing entity (NPE) or "patent troll."
As a non-practicing entity, Intellectual Ventures I LLC does not manufacture products or provide services based on the patents it holds. Instead, its operations consist of acquiring patents from inventors, universities, and other companies and then licensing these intellectual property assets to technology companies under threat of litigation. The firm's aggregated portfolio is vast, spanning technologies from software and cybersecurity to telecommunications and semiconductors. Investors in its funds have reportedly included major technology companies like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and Google.
The company's patent-litigation posture is exclusively that of a plaintiff, a fact supported by its record of two plaintiff cases and zero defendant cases in the provided data. Intellectual Ventures I LLC acts as a patent assertion entity, initiating lawsuits to generate revenue from its acquired patent portfolio. The two tracked cases are representative of its strategy: both were filed on December 8, 2010, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware against major cybersecurity companies Symantec Corp. and Trend Micro Inc.
The notable cases against Symantec and Trend Micro involved patents related to email filtering and computer security. These lawsuits, part of the first litigation campaign ever filed by Intellectual Ventures, were intensely fought for several years. Ultimately, the patents asserted by Intellectual Ventures I LLC in these cases were declared invalid and ineligible for patent protection by the courts, a significant setback for the assertion campaign.
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This was a multi-defendant litigation where claims against most defendants were eventually dismissed, following settlements or as a result of the § 101 invalidity finding in the separate Symantec case.
The district court found the asserted claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,073,142 to be ineligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The decision was subsequently appealed.
A jury initially found infringement, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the decision on September 30, 2016. The Federal Circuit held the asserted claim of the patent invalid for being directed to patent-ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
This case was severed from the Symantec lawsuit in 2012. Intellectual Ventures later voluntarily withdrew the infringement claims related to patent 5,987,610, though the litigation continued over other patents.
This was a consolidated action where Intellectual Ventures I LLC sued several cybersecurity companies for infringement. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants, ruling that the asserted claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,460,050 were invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because they were directed to an abstract idea without an inventive concept.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's decision, holding that the asserted claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,073,142 were invalid because they were directed to the abstract idea of filtering email without adding an inventive concept.
This appeal concerned the district court's award of attorneys' fees to Trend Micro after finding the case exceptional. The CAFC vacated the fee award and remanded the case, instructing the district court to reconsider the award under the 'totality of the circumstances.'