Vringo

History

Vringo was founded in 2006 by Israeli entrepreneurs and venture capitalist Jonathan Medved and mobile software specialist David Goldfarb. The company was initially funded by private equity firm Warburg Pincus in 2007. By December 2009, it had raised $14 million in funding. Vringo priced its initial public offering on June 22, 2010, and raised $11 million.

On March 14, 2012, Vringo entered into a definitive agreement to merge with Innovate/Protect, an intellectual property company founded by Andrew Kennedy Lang, the former chief technology officer at Lycos, and Alexander R. Berger, a former Vice President at Hudson Bay Capital. At that time, Andrew Perlman replaced Jonathan Medved as CEO. On April 13, 2012, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and "shark" investor on the television series Shark Tank, disclosed a 7.4% stake in the company. The merger with Innovate/Protect was completed on July 19, 2012, with Mr. Lang joining Vringo as chief technology officer and Mr. Berger as chief operating officer. Innovate/Protect director Donald E. Stout, the president of NTP holdings, which collected $612.5 million from BlackBerry-maker RIM, joined the Vringo board of directors in connection with the merger. Vringo's head of licensing, litigation and intellectual property is David L. Cohen, who was formerly an in-house lawyer at Nokia.

The company was invited to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on August 1, 2012, to mark the successful completion of the merger. In August 2012, the company raised $31.2 million to buy 124 patent families relating to telecommunications and infrastructure technology from Nokia Corp. The 124 patent families comprise over 500 patents and applications including 110 issued patents in the US. Over 45 patents families have at least one patent in force in various European jurisdictions. In an October 2012 common stock offering, Vringo raised an additional $45 million.

Google Litigation

Through its merger with Innovate/Protect, Inc., Vringo acquired ownership of patents that had been purchased from Lycos, Inc. and were asserted in a patent infringement lawsuit against AOL Inc., Google, IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned IAC Search & Media, Gannett Co Inc. and Target Corp. The lawsuit went to trial on October 16, 2012, in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk Division.

On November 6, 2012, a jury ruled in favor of Vringo's wholly owned subsidiary, I/P Engine, and against the defendants with respect to defendants' infringement of the asserted claims of the patents. After finding that the asserted claims of the patents-in-suit were both valid, and infringed by Defendants, the jury found that reasonable royalty damages should be based on a "running royalty", and that the running royalty rate should be 3.5%. On November 20, 2012, the clerk entered the Court's final judgment. I/P Engine presented evidence at trial that the appropriate way to determine the incremental royalty base attributable to Google's infringement was to calculate 20.9% of Google's U.S. AdWords revenue, then apply a 3.5% running royalty rate to that base. The ruling was upheld on appeal by a U.S. District Court in January 2014.

Vringo has drawn criticism over some of its litigation tactics, with the target of at least one lawsuit accusing the company of acting as a patent troll. A Google spokesperson said on January 22, 2014, that the AdWords case "further highlights the mischief trolls can make with the patent system" and indicated that a further appeal of the ruling was likely.

On August 15, 2014 the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a 2-1 majority decision reversed the lower federal court decision concerning the patent infringement lawsuit filed against Google et al. The presiding Circuit Judges concluded that I/P Engines search patents were "Obvious" and therefore unenforceable upon the defendants. Intellectual Asset Magazine called the decision "the most troubling patent case of 2014," and said the appeals court's decision "should be of huge concern to all patent owners in the US."

ZTE Litigation

Vringo has also filed lawsuits against ZTE Corporation and many of its subsidiaries over failure to take a license to telecom infrastructure patents that Vringo acquired from Nokia Corporation and Alcatel-Lucent. Vringo brought the first case on October 8, 2012, in the UK. The company filed a second lawsuit against ZTE in Germany on November 15, 2012, and a third, also in the UK, on December 5, 2012. On November 28, 2014, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom found that ZTE infringed the asserted patent, which relates to 3G and 4G infrastructure equipment, and also confirmed that the asserted patent was valid as amended. The UK court later ordered ZTE to pay Vringo's costs. On December 7, 2015, ZTE entered into an agreement with Vringo to pay them a lump sum settlement amount of 21.5 million.

Awards