PLANO, Texas A well-known patent litigant that successfully extracted tens of millions of dollars in Check 21 license fees from the biggest banks filed a new slew of suits against Texas credit unions and banks yesterday over rights to the popular remote deposit capture technology that allows consumers to deposit checks using their smartphones.
The latest suits filed by DataTreasury claim that some of the biggest third-party providers of RDC, including Jack Henry & Associates, Fiserv, Fidelity National Information Services, as well as dozens of credit unions and banks, are infringing on its patents for remote image capture with centralized processing and storage.
The new slew of suits target United Heritage CU, Cherokee County FCU, Advanced FCU, DATCU CU, Texas State Bank, East Texas Bancshares, Golden Bank, Citizens Bancorp, Midsouth Bancorp and dozens of others; a total of more than 75 defendants.
DataTreasury is famous for having spent years suing dozens of the biggest banks over its patents for online processing and storage of checks, the process made possible under the Check 21 legislation, and winning concessions for hundreds of millions of dollars in license fees as a result. Among those agreeing to pay fees after being sued are JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citibank. The company’s suits were so threatening to the biggest banks that they succeeded in getting an unprecedented provision included in the 2011 patent reform bill that specifically gives financial service providers the right to demand a review by their own regulator for the validity of the patent, once they are challenged for patent infringement.
According to the latest slew of suits, the RDC patents were awarded to DataTreasury founder Claudio Ballard, in 1999 and already went through a reexamination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2007. Another reexamination, requested by an anonymous party, is currently ongoing, according to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
The company is asking the court to declare the defendants in infringement of its patents, to issue a permanent injunction barring them from using the technology and to award it damages based on a “reasonable royalty.”
