AGIS Software Development LLC (‘AGIS LLC’’) is at it again with its sixth litigation wave. This time, AGIS LLC filed lawsuits against AT&T, GPSWOX, L3 Harris, Lenovo, Motorola Solutions, Rtx, Acer, Dell, HP Enterprise, HP Inc., Snap, Systemic Holding, Tencent, F-Secure, General Dynamics, and Booz Allen Hamilton Holding, alleging infringement of up to six patents belonging to the same extended family with the same priority date. To date, AGIS LLC and its affiliate, AGIS, Inc., have invited forty-one defendants to licensing negotiations before the district courts of Eastern and Western Texas, Southern Florida, and the ITC. A few defendants have been sued by AGIS LLC a second or third time, even after AGIS LLC voluntarily dismissed its earlier case against them with prejudice. Six companies have filed declaratory actions against AGIS LLC and its affiliates to get closure.
Founded in June 2004, AGIS, Inc. developed and launched a command and control software platform called LifeRing, marketed to the government, military, and first responders. Shortly after, AGIS, Inc. combined existing technologies, GPS, mobile messaging, cellular communications, and encryption and filed a patent application on September 21, 2004, US application 10/711,490 (granted as US 7,031,728). After ten years of performing government contract work and trying to partner with several tech companies, AGIS, Inc. decided to monetize US 7,031,728. By 2014, this had spawned a portfolio of thirteen US-granted patents, continuations, and continuations in part.
In its first lawsuit, AGIS, Inc. sent a demand letter in May of 2014 to Life360, a nascent company just concluding a $50M investment round. In the end, Life360 was victorious as they were found not to infringe any of AGIS, Inc.’s patents and were awarded almost $700K in attorney fees. The Federal Circuit upheld the non-infringement decision and the attorney fee award. Life360 did not, however, succeed in getting the SDFla jury to invalidate the patents. Still, the SDFla court did find that the method claims, which were all that remained after Markman, had no reasonable chance of success, and therefore, prosecution against Life360 should not have been continued. The court concluded this after finding that no single actor performed all of the elements of AGIS, Inc.’s method claims, which involved steps to be performed by multiple users. The SDFla court cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2014 Limelight Networks vs Akamai case, which came down less than a month after AGIS, Inc. filed its suit.
AGIS, Inc. and its affiliates were not deterred after this initial setback. AGIS LLC, formed in Texas in May of 2017, initiated infringement lawsuits against Apple, HTC, Huawei, LG, and ZTE in June of 2017 with a different set of patents belonging to the same extended family. Alphabet’s Waze and Samsung were sued two years later. AGIS LLC has initiated litigation campaigns also in 2021 and 2022, taking thirteen defendants to the ITC, and now in 2024, involving sixteen defendants in the EDTex. According to AGIS LLC’s website, AGIS LLC has settled with ten defendants, but no terms have been disclosed. The only transparency offered is the reporting that Meta took a license to AGIS LLC’s portfolio and AGIS took a license to two of Meta’s patents.
AGIS LLC’s litigation has been disclosed as financed by third parties in case proceedings. Longford Capital Management figures prominently in these discussions, which makes sense given the familiarity between AGIS LLC’s litigation counsel, Fabricant LLP, and Longford Capital Management.
It is possible that AGIS LLC’s recent spate of cases in EDTex could be the last. Of the thirteen grants AGIS LLC and AGIS, Inc. have litigated on, eight have expired as of September 21, 2024, and the remaining five will expire within the next two years. The validity of three of these patents was challenged in the Life360 case without success, but they were found not to be infringed by Life360. The other two patents, US 7,630,724 and US 8,213,970, were challenged in inter-partes or ex-parte reviews with mixed results. Interestingly, the ‘724 has not been asserted in any of the cases filed by AGIS LLC in 2024, and the PTAB found that claims 1 and 3-9 of the ‘970 were unpatentable. AGIS LLC was able to amend claims 2 and 10-13 of the ‘970 in a subsequent ex-parte review, which now has been asserted in the new 2024 cases. Google, in its DJ complaint in Case No. 5:23-cv-03624-BLF, points out, though, that the remaining original claims 2 and 10-13 were found to be invalid in USPTO Reexamination Control Number 90/014,507 in view of the same or similar prior art as that presented in the inter-partes review proceedings for claims 1 and 3-9.
