June 11, 2026
A Patent That Expired in 2020 Is Having a Busy Year
Lutron, Crestron and Leviton are swept into a litigation wave centered on decades-old technology
Court records show that between June 3 and June 5, two related offshore entities, Portus Singapore PTE Ltd and Portus PTY Ltd, filed 13 patent infringement lawsuits against some of the most recognizable names in lighting controls and connected buildings, including Lutron, Leviton, Crestron, Savant, Somfy, Resideo and Carrier. Federal dockets show more than 25 Portus filings in the past 90 days.
The asserted patents trace to a single application filed December 17, 1999, describing remote monitoring and control of premises devices through a standard web browser. By the complaints' own account, one of the two patents expired no later than June 7, 2020. Patent law permits damages reaching back six years from the date a suit is filed, which means a complaint filed June 4, 2026 can reach back to June 4, 2020 — a recovery window for that patent of roughly three days.
The Second Patent Has a Problem Too
The complaints disclose that the second patent, which issued in 2018, is "subject to a terminal disclaimer." The filings do not explain the term, and they never state when that patent expires. The omission is worth pausing on.
A terminal disclaimer is a commitment a patent applicant makes to the Patent Office, typically to overcome a rejection for claiming the same invention twice. It binds the later patent's expiration to an earlier one in the same family. If the disclaimer here ties the 2018 patent back to its 1999-vintage parent, the two patents likely died together in mid-2020, and the entire 13-suit campaign would rest on damages windows measured in days. The complaints carefully promise not to seek damages "after expiration" of either patent while declining to say when the second expiration occurred. Defendants will ask. The answer may decide whether these cases are worth anyone's legal fees, including the plaintiff's.
Who Is Portus?
The complaints answer that question with unusual candor. Portus states that it "has never sold a product," that no predecessor has ever sold a product, and that it is a non-practicing entity with nothing to mark. The filings also acknowledge prior "settlement licenses with several defendant entities," meaning companies have paid to resolve earlier Portus claims, though confidentiality terms keep the names and figures out of the pleadings.
The structure of the demands is consistent across most of the lighting-industry complaints we reviewed. Portus seeks no injunction and concedes it cannot recover anything for the period after expiration. What remains is a request for a reasonable royalty inside whatever enforceable window survives the arithmetic above.
Two Templates, One Wrong Defendant
The filings offer clues about how the campaign was assembled, because two distinct complaint templates were circulating on the same day. The Crestron complaint, filed June 3 by Ramey LLP, is the polished version: 19 pages, full disclosure of the 2020 expiration, element-by-element infringement mapping, and a demand limited to a reasonable royalty. The Leviton and Lutron complaints follow it nearly word for word.
The Savant complaint, filed the same day in Manhattan, is something else. It runs nine pages, opens by accusing "Defendant, BSH Home Appliances Corporation," the Bosch and Siemens appliance venture, then pivots to Savant (which owns the GE Lighting brand) for the rest of the document. It never names a single Savant product. It omits any mention of the 2020 expiration. And it demands lost profits, a remedy that sits awkwardly beside the plaintiff's own pleading that it has never sold anything. The artifact points to a recycled document from an earlier case against a different company, and it suggests there are prior Portus waves, against appliance or security firms, that predate the lighting industry's turn in the barrel.
This Is Bigger Than Lighting
The defendant list reads like a connected-buildings trade show floor plan. Beyond the lighting-control names, the June filings target Carrier, Resideo, Chamberlain, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Lenovo and Motorola. The accused architecture is the same in every complaint we reviewed: a cloud service, a mobile app, and a premises gateway talking to local devices. Crestron's XiO Cloud, Leviton's Lumina Gateway and Lutron's Connect Bridge are slotted into identical claim language with the product names swapped.
That template logic should concern lighting people well beyond the current defendants. Any manufacturer running networked lighting controls through a cloud account, an app login and a hub fits the pattern.
What Comes Next
Venue choices follow a pattern too.
- Crestron, headquartered in Rockleigh, New Jersey (exit 165), was sued in Dallas based on a Plano office.
- Leviton, run from Long Island, New York, drew a complaint across the county line in the Eastern District.
- Lutron, a Pennsylvania company, was sued in Boston over a 13th-floor experience center. Four cases, four districts, none filed where the defendant resides, which complicates any coordinated defense.
The Lutron complaint, for its part, was signed by a North Andover, Massachusetts attorney whose firm's public website advertises debt collection harassment and robocall cases.
For lighting people, the practical question is how hard the defendants fight. A successful validity challenge in any one forum could undercut every case at once, but litigating costs more than many royalty demands, which is the economic logic these campaigns rest on. The patents describe a 1999 vision of controlling a home through a browser. Whether that vision entitles its current owners to royalties from an industry that built the real thing is now a question for at least four federal judges, starting with the question of whether either patent was alive long enough to matter.
