A shell company with a patent linked to Intellectual Ventures, the world's biggest patent-holding company, has quietly filed a new lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas against a vast range of computer peripheral makers and sellers.

The complaint (PDF), filed last week under the name Minero Digital LLC, demands that 26 companies pay royalties on USB hubs, which link together multiple USB-enabled devices. The defendants include the nation's biggest electronic retailers, like Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Fry's, and Amazon. Also named are relatively small networking companies like HooToo. Major manufacturers are also included; Minero says that Belkin alone has eight different brands of USB hubs that infringe its patent.

Minero is asking for unspecified damages and an injunction that would shut down sales of the dozens of different product lines named in the complaint.

The link between IV and Minero is clear from USPTO assignment records, which show that US Patent No. 5,675,811 passed into an IV holding company in 2003, and then was transferred to Minero in April 2015.

Minero's president is Daniel Perez, a former big-firm lawyer who has been patent trolling since at least 2009. It isn't clear what kind of financial arrangements Perez made with Intellectual Ventures: sometimes the giant patent-holding company sells its patents off with "no strings attached," while in other cases it maintains revenue-splitting deals with the new patent owners. An Intellectual Ventures spokesperson says they're not involved in the lawsuit and that Minero Digital is not part of IV but wouldn't answer other questions. Perez didn't respond to a request for comment.

Minero's business address is an office suite in Allen, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. It shares the address with other patent-holding companies controlled by Perez, such as Z-Dimensional LLC, which has sued several companies over a 3-D software patent.

Patent From A Storied Past

The '811 patent describes a system in which "intelligent daisy-chainable serial" bus connections create an "efficient unambiguous method" of linking together various peripherals, while being connected to a base station. It sounds and looks something like what a bunch of stuff connected together with USB cords and ports might look like, but the term Universal Serial Bus (USB) doesn't appear anywhere in the patent.

At the time of the patent's filing, the USB standard was still being researched by a group of seven companies, including Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and others. The group had started the work in 1994, and USB 1.0 wasn't introduced to the market until November 1995, several months after the '811 patent was filed.

The '811 patent originated at General Magic, a company that began as an internal project at Apple. General Magic's focus was an early attempt to create personal digital assistants, but despite having partnerships with Sony, Motorola, AT&T, and others, the company didn't take off. Products like Sony's Magic Link (at right) failed to sell widely, and instead the first rush of PDA's was dominated by Palm.

General Magic ceased operations in 2002, and its assets, including patents, were sold off. Intellectual Ventures, which in 2003 had positioned itself as a kind of "patent defense fund," acquired the '811 patent.

The people who worked there went on to have an outsized influence on technology, however. Tony Fadell, who played a key role in creating both the iPod and the iPhone before going on to found Nest, worked at General Magic; so did Andy Rubin, who oversaw Google's Android operating system.

"The atmosphere at the company helped nurture the ambition of employees that have gone onto greater glory," wrote Michael Kanellos in a 2011 Forbes article about General Magic called "The Most Important Dead Company in Silicon Valley."

Fadell is named as one of the inventors on the '811 patent. So is Steve Perlman, who worked at Apple on projects including QuickTime before going on to found WebTV and, more recently, Artemis Research. The other two inventors are Walter Broedner, who is listed as the lead inventor, and John Watkins. What role these inventors will play in the litigation, if any, remains to be seen.

It isn't immediately clear when the '811 patent expires. Normally patents expire 20 years from the filing date, meaning that it would have expired in August of this year; however, patents filed after 1995 are sometimes eligible for extensions. Either way, the patent-holder can claim for up to six years of back damages in court.