On Friday, February 8, noted and sometimes infamous patent aggregator Intellectual Ventures filed three large patent infringement complaints in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas.  In the complaints, Intellectual Ventures accuses several providers of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services of infringing 19 patents that, according to IV, “cover fundamental and important aspects of DSL technology and services.”  The DSL providers targeted by IV in these suits include AT&T,  SBC, CenturyLink, Embarq, Qwest, Savvis, Windsteam, and PAETEC.

Among IV’s many infringement allegations are claims that the DSL providers and their customers are infringing several of the asserted patents based on providing or using network services in compliance with two ITU-T standards: G.993.2, also known as the Very High Speed DSL Transceivers 2 (VDSL2) standard; and G.992.3, also known as the Asymmetric DSL Transceivers 2 (ADSL2) standard.  It’s not a stretch to infer from these allegations that Intellectual Ventures considers these patents to be essential to these standards, so there is a potential for RAND obligations under the ITU-T’s Patent Policy to come into play  — particularly given that some of the patents asserted by IV were previously owned by Bell Atlantic Network Services, a predecessor of Verizon that was involved in the development of these standards.

• Intellectual Ventures v. AT&T Complaint
• Intellectual Ventures v. CenturyLink Complaint
• Intellectual Ventures v. Windstream Complaint

Perhaps in a tacit acknowledgment of the existence of RAND obligations, Intellectual Ventures is not seeking injunctive relief from the court here (unlike, for instance, in a 2011 complaint it filed against Motorola Mobility).  Instead, IV is asking only for monetary relief — damages for past infringement, enhanced damages for willful infringement, and a judgment for ongoing royalties to cover any future infringement.

A list of the patents asserted by IV in each of the complaints is below: