Hispeed got me curious with his list so I got busy on Pacer to see what I could ferret out about these cases.
Appears that all the recent Sampo litigation settlements stem from patent #5,331,637 "Multicast Routing Using Core Based Trees" issued in 1994. The 4 cases you reference were all dismissed with prejudice. Similar cases against Amazon, Intuit, Twitter and TIBCO remain open. The settled cases usually lasted anywhere from 50 to 150 days, so pretty short litigation period for all of them.
The Relay IP and Vantage Point cases are based on patent #5,463,750 "Method and Apparatus for Translating Virtual Addresses in a Data Processing System having Multiple Instruction Pipelines and Separate TLB's for Each Pipeline" issued in 1995. There are about 40 cases filed for Vantage Point and 45 for Relay IP of which about half have settled, some last year and some this year.
You look at these Complaints and it quickly becomes apparent that it is an assembly line process. The Complaints, exhibits and filings are nearly identical within patent families. For instance the Sampo suit against eBay is essentially word for word identical to the suit against Facebook.
What is interesting is how the Court has been cooperative in allowing Sampo, Relay and Vantage to file multiple suits on the same day and then "coordinate" discovery across multiple suits in a manner that keeps the plaintiff's costs way down. A very smart tactic.
Given the age on the patents involved and the fairly short duration of most of these suits I would not expect to see large dollar amounts rolling in to Marathon on these settlements. Cumulatively however, they might add up to something significant. Just hard to tell.
