Multiple ‘peace deals’ among July and August patent assignments
Litigation disputes and licensing negotiations drove several transactions between industry players over the summer
By Jacob Schindler
Transactions watch is a bimonthly Sisvel Insights feature. Our aim is to help patent owners, technology users and their advisers stay abreast of patent transfers with the potential to affect the licensing landscape. It is entirely based on public records and news reports.
The main focus is on fields of technology subject to significant standardisation – including mobile communications, wireless networking and multimedia – but we also highlight deals in other technology areas that catch our attention.
Discussion of the technology covered by various patents is based solely on keywords in the patent titles – readers can review the patents in full via the linked transaction documents.
Patent assets remain a key bargaining chip in high-level licensing talks. A July transaction between Ericsson and Oppo is the latest indication of this, as it coincided with a new patent cross-licence between the pair.
The July-August period in USPTO assignments also saw two agreements which helped bring litigation to a close. In one case, that of Philips and Telit Cinterion, the claimant received patent assets from an accused infringer. In the other, plaintiff Open Text Corp surrendered over 100 patents to a company it had named as a litigation defendant.
Below are these and the other patent transactions that caught our eye over the past two months.
Multimedia
Philips recorded two transactions involving media-related patents.
One was the April 2024 assignment of eight patents to General Video LLC. The technologies addressed include the transmission of video and data over a serial link, as well as stereoscopic image data.
More recently, Philips assigned 22 patents to Media Content Protection LLC in late July. As the name of the LLC suggests, the rights appear mainly related to digital rights management and authentication.
Velos Media transferred eight patents back to Sharp, their original owner. The transaction presumably involves HEVC-related rights and is the first known Velos assignment since 2022.
Wireless
Orange assigned five granted US patents to Transpacific IP. The assets span a range of areas, including electronic payments, messaging, voice control, wireless pairing and short-range communications.
Ericsson recorded two notable outgoing assignments during the period.
Five patents related to radio communications networks were transferred to Oppo in June. The two parties announced a global patent cross licence on 15th July, along with business cooperation on a number of 5G projects. The duo’s previous 2019 licence coincided with the transfer of over 100 patents, so watch this space.
A global portfolio including at least 25 US patents was transferred to Sago Strategic Solutions LLC in June. The assignment document also lists assets from the EPO, Germany, France, UK, China and India, among others. LTE is among the technologies mentioned in the patent titles.
Telit Cinterion, which provides a range of cellular IoT devices and solutions, assigned nine wireless-related patents to Philips on 19th August. Around this time, court filings revealed that the pair had settled a patent litigation dispute in the United States. The patents had previously been assigned to Thales, which sold its cellular IoT business to Telit in 2022.
Other noteworthy transactions
One further assignment under Allied Security Trust’s IP3 programme was revealed. Palo Alto Networks Inc picked up 15 patents with a range of origins and subject matters. These included data-related rights from Indian IT major Wipro; an array of patents produced within Korean universities; and others.
In July cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Inc received a series of assignments from Open Text Corp comprising over 100 US patent assets in total. The rights appear to cover a wide range of technology areas from augmented reality to deep learning to content management. The transactions follow the two companies’ settlement of US patent litigation in which Open Text had been the plaintiff.
