Context:
- Earlier this year we were first to report that Donald Trump Jr., a businessman, social media personality and the eldest son of President Donald Trump, is a shareholder in SIM IP, legendary patent monetizer’s Erich Spangenberg’s new company (March 20, 2025 ip fray article).
- Fintiv, which was originally named Mozido and aspired to become a leader in mobile payments with funding from the likes of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is a patent licensing firm that actively enforces. Fintiv is famous in patent litigation circles thanks to the “[NHK-]Fintiv rule” by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It was put in place in 2020 in connection with an Apple petition for inter partes review of a Fintiv patent and reinstated this year as one of Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart’s measures to strengthen U.S. patent enforcement (March 27, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: The Information reported yesterday that Donald Trump Jr. owns 5% of Fintiv. Furthermore, he bought thousands of acres in northern Maine through a company he runs with Fintiv founder Michael Liberty’s son and the family lawyer. Furthermore, the report says Fintiv is presently seeking approximately $300 million from Middle Eastern investors.
Direct impact: The article raises allegations of conflicts of interest, insinuating that President Trump’s decision to grant Liberty a presidential pardon in the waning days of his first term (over illegal campaign contributions) paved the way for the deal, though the investment apparently came about a year later. The article does not present a smoking gun for any impropriety, though. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, the assumption must be that Mr. Trump invested in Fintiv at market value.
Wider ramifications: Patent licensing is an attractive business model that also attracts famous high-net-worth individuals.
There is an ongoing dispute with Apple (May 19, 2025 ip fray article; August 8, 2025 article by 9-to-5 Mac) as well as with Paypal (April 30, 2025 Federal Circuit opinion). The latest development in Fintiv’s campaign against Apple is a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) and trade secrets complaint filed in the Northern District of Georgia (i.e., Atlanta) (August 11, 2025 press release by Fintiv’s outside counsel). Here’s the complaint, which alleges “corporate theft and racketeering of monumental
proportions”:
As we explained yesterday, Apple is the least soft target a patentee could sue. It has now developed a workaround for the patents underlying Masimo’s U.S. import ban. Out of the five patent claims, four can be circumvented by not performing the necessary calculations on the Apple Watch itself (though Masimo may have argued, and may continue to argue, that a paired Apple Watch is essentially an iPhone accessory), and the fifth does not explicitly require computations to be performed on the claimed “user-worn device”, but it requires the result to be displayed there. Apple now just sends the measurement data from the Watch to the iPhone, evaluates the data there and displays the result in the Apple Health app for iOS. Maybe Masimo could assert some other claims against the current implementation, but the patents will expire in three years from now.
Fintiv has been trying since 2018 to gain leverage over Apple, but has not struck a license deal that would probably be necessary in order for Mr. Trump to get a return on his investment in Fintiv, unless someone else, such as Paypal, pays enough to Fintiv.