Ha of COURSE it's Fortress.
(Also responsible for a significant chunk of patent trolling activity rn, not to mention a patent assertion campaign at the start of COVID targeting COVID diagnostics, among other things.)
I think it’d be good for more people to know that the exact same private equity executives responsible for destroying hundreds of jobs at Vice — Fortress Investment Group — are also responsible for destroying thousands of jobs at Gannett newspapers.
OK so. Fortress has a fund that is specifically dedicated to funding patent litigation. Most notably, they fund VLSI, which has been going after Intel for a few years now. But also they funded Labrador Diagnostics, who sued BioFire over diagnostic tests. www.patentprogress.org/2020/03/pate...
After it was reported that Labrador was including BioFire's COVID testing in what it accused of infringement, Labrador claimed it would drop that part of the case (though I don't recall if that actually happened, there was reason to think it might not be meaningful, as I explained in the post.)
In the meantime, VLSI has filed something like 10 lawsuits against Intel, at last count. In one of them, they walked away from the case when they thought they might have to disclose who their funders were (speculation is that it's because some of the funders are foreign sovereign wealth funds.)
There's ALSO some fun history, in that VLSI's firm (Irell) is also the Trump PTO Director's old firm, and some of the policies he put in place during that time benefited VLSI by preventing Intel from seeking review of those patents. (Someone else did. They were largely invalidated.)
ANOTHER one of their subs has been trying to get a decent chunk of the handset market banned from import, and I'm sure there's others I'm blanking on right this second.
