Beer Bong Companies Clash; Crypto Company Sues Coinbase; Campaigns Spiral in

District court and Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) filings were both down substantially this week, with 57 and 15, respectively, and 91 district court terminations. The drop-off of patent filings in the Western District of Texas has perhaps not been as pronounced as might be expected, though obviously most of those cases are being assigned to other judges there, or continuations of defendants being added to suits already within the Waco court’s jurisdiction. The Traxcell campaign continued to spiral, with many new defendants added; ditto the Hilco capital-led Bell Semiconductor case, which added an even more diverse list of defendants to the already-long roster. Otherwise most suits this week, with the exception of a few highlighted below, are related to earlier-filed suits.

Crypto Capital Company Sues—in Own Name: While private equity and litigation funding (or some equivalent) now undergirds some 30% of all U.S. patent litigation, it’s exceedingly rare to see a capital company buying the patents, keeping them in their own name, and then selling as the named defendant. But that is just what Veritaseum Capital LLC appears to have done with U.S. Patent 11,196,566. Suing the recently plagued cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which has been hit hard by the crypto winter, the Wyoming-based Veritaseum—which bills itself as  “FinTech using blockchain to encode contracts for business transactions,” whatever that means, has, per Twitter, one U.S. and one Japanese patent “available for licensure.” They’ve sued Coinbase on that patent in Delaware. While the patent landscape for blockchain patents is still somewhat limited, it will be interesting to see, as smaller coins and smart contract startups fail, if there is a rush to monetize patents that were acquired along the way. The Twitter dialogue around the suit is interesting—with armchair commentors weighing in on infringement, damages, and other aspects of the complaint.

Beer Chugging Companies Clash: Drink it down; plaintiff patent owner Chug Bud, a self-proclaimed “innovator in the field of drinking accessories,” has lashed out at competitor Booze Missile for infringing patent 10,278,526. Chug Bud alleges that Johnny Manziel, Travis Kelce, and Post Malone have all collaborated to support their products, or “missiles,” which are, per their complaint and website, portable beer bongs plus shotgun funnels, which help you—you guessed it—chug a can of beer in one gulp. Here, a picture is worth a thousand words:

You really can get a patent on anything these days.

PTAB (15)