Summary: Dominion Harbor, the patent troll that gets bucketloads of patents from Intellectual Ventures (a patent troll strongly connected to Microsoft and Bill Gates), is still suing using shell entities

IT has been a while since we last mentioned the subject because we generally want to focus on GNU/Linux rather than patents. But earlier today Unified Patents brought up a familiar story: Microsoft-connected (through Intellectual Ventures) patent troll Dominion Harbor is hiding behind proxies again and it is going after the two leading Android OEMs, Huawei and Samsung. As Mr. Jain put it:

On December 31, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,460,197 asserted by Health Watch, LLC (a Dominion Harbor subsidiary and well-known NPE). The ‘197 patent, directed to wearable sensors and electronic devices, has been asserted against Huawei and Samsung.

Also at the exact same time he mentioned this other proxy of Dominion Harbor:

On December 31, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 5,999,947 asserted by Pure Data Systems, LLC (a Dominion Harbor subsidiary and well-known NPE).

Join says that "[t]he ‘947 patent [is] directed to distributing changes made to a database to one or more client computers," which certainly sounds abstract and thus bunk as per 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. Keep an eye on these trolls; Microsoft says it has reached "truce", but who believes Microsoft these days? ⬆