Quito Enterprises filed a patent infringement suit in Florida against Netflix, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Slacker, Pandora Media, Strands, Veoh Networks, Realnetworks, Hulu, NBC Universal, News Corp, Last.fm, and CBS Corp on December 26th. Other than filing on Boxing Day, another unusual fact is that this patent was sold at auction last April for $975,000 ($1,072,500 with buyer's commission).
This highlights two concepts: First the role open outcry public auctions in reallocation of IP. It also presents a potential perception anomaly in downstream licensing, where in a public auction 8 months ago amidst an open market of knowledgable IP practitioners established a market price for ownership of the entire patent.
One part of my IP database tracks the history of approximately 1800 patents offered at auction: 27 have been subject to litigation either pre or post-auction in 54 distinct federal actions.