Irish Soda Bread?
While Ireland is famous for one-named singers (Bono, Enya), soda bread, an obsession with Rugby, and dare we say Guinness, Ireland has another, lesser known talent, litigation. The country has been building a base of NPE (non-producing entities) that have been buying IP assets from a number of companies in the CE space. Many of these entities are associated with Magnetar Capital (pvt), an Illinois-based hedge fund with over $12b in assets that bills itself as an alternative manager. The NPE’s acquire IP assets from companies that are exiting businesses or are willing to share license streams or litigation outcomes.
We have mentioned a few of the filings that have to do with CE products involving IP from Hewlett-Packard (HPE), Mitsubishi (8058.JP), Microchip (MCHP) and others, that have been or are being litigated in US courts, usually in the Western District Court of Texas. The latest, filed at the end of last month, was against Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), who was accused of infringing on three patents that underlie wireless charging, all the way back to the Galaxy S6 Edge, released in April 2015 (since discontinued), that Scramoge Technlogy (pvt), an Irish NPE run by Magnetar, who purchased 123 patents from LG Innotek (011070.KS) for $4.4m last February as part of the company’s exit from the wireless charging business. Investors might remember Solus OLED (pvt), another NPE operated by Magnetar that has been in court with Samsung and LG Display since 2019 over OLED IP. While these entities are obviously positioned to litigate against the CE industry’s largest entities, the one thing that is ensured is that in the long run, consumers pay for the cost of the litigation and lawyers get new BMW’s every year.
We have mentioned a few of the filings that have to do with CE products involving IP from Hewlett-Packard (HPE), Mitsubishi (8058.JP), Microchip (MCHP) and others, that have been or are being litigated in US courts, usually in the Western District Court of Texas. The latest, filed at the end of last month, was against Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), who was accused of infringing on three patents that underlie wireless charging, all the way back to the Galaxy S6 Edge, released in April 2015 (since discontinued), that Scramoge Technlogy (pvt), an Irish NPE run by Magnetar, who purchased 123 patents from LG Innotek (011070.KS) for $4.4m last February as part of the company’s exit from the wireless charging business. Investors might remember Solus OLED (pvt), another NPE operated by Magnetar that has been in court with Samsung and LG Display since 2019 over OLED IP. While these entities are obviously positioned to litigate against the CE industry’s largest entities, the one thing that is ensured is that in the long run, consumers pay for the cost of the litigation and lawyers get new BMW’s every year.
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