Hello again my dear readers. I would like to apologize for my long absence, I have missed you almost as much as you have missed us. I would also like to apologize for Andrew's post yesterday, "we're back" which failed to make a joke about the disturbing 90's animated feature "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story" in which a one-eyed carnival barker with mind control powers is eaten by crows. It shan't happen again.
With that out of the way, I wanted to call attention to a recent opinion from Judge Williams on a contract dispute between various NPE entities. We don't get to see these much as they're usually heavily redacted, but as my father used to say, "you can't redact what's in your heart." So too, it's tough to redact a court opinion on a contract you're suing over so we get a lot of detail here.
(Eds. note - my dad does not actually say that)
The agreement in CBV, Inc. v. ChanBond, LLC, C.A. No. 21-1456-GBW (D. Del. Mar. 13, 2024) (Mem. Op.) involved a bewildering array of related parties with silly names exchanging ludicrous sums. CBV had a portfolio of patents "related to the delivery of high-speed date over cable systems." Id. at 3. Apparently they weren't doing CBV much good just sitting around, because they sold them to IP Navigation group, which does just what it says on the tin. IP Navigation then created ChanBond for the purpose of buying and enforcing/licensing the patents and CBV transferred them in exchange for (drumroll . . . ):
a 100% stake in "Net Recoveries" up to $1,000,000 (and a 50% stake in future recoveries thereafter) from any future profits ChanBond received from licensing, enforcing, and/or selling the CBV patents.
Id.
Chanbond then entered into another agreement with IPNav (the opinion has an amusing footnote explaining that this is, in fact, a different company from the IP Navigation Group) granting them 22% of the proceeds for "advisory services."
This turned out to be a pretty good deal for everyone involved because, following a similarly labrynthine bit of patent litigation in this district, Chanbond ultimately received $125,000,000.
This pretty immediately resulted everyone suing each other. IPNav moved to recover its share in arbitration and CBV filed this suit (with a preliminary injunction and everything) to prevent any payments to IPNav and to prevent any such payment from being deducted from the "net proceeds" in which it had a 50% share. This resulted in a series of further settlement agreements between the parties.
The opinion here is an interesting read in which I took a reality-tv-esque interest. I hope it brings you the same joy, dear reader.
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