Several years ago marked the major shake-down of Blackberry maker, Research in Motion, for a expensive legal settlement by NTP Inc. The patent holding giant NTP announced Friday that it had initiated a torrent of patent infringement lawsuits against some of the tech world’s leading companies.

The firm out of Richmond, Virginia filed lawsuits Thursday night against tech giants, Apple, Google, HTC, LG Electronics, Microsoft, and Motorola, accusing each company of infringement upon eight NTP patents related to wireless email technology.

“The filing of suit today is necessary to ensure that those companies who are infringing NTP’s patents will be required to pay a licensing fee,” NTP co-founder Donald Stout said in a prepared statement. The lawsuits were filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Not one of the accused companies has offered comments on this fresh attack yet.

NTP has already established notoriety due to its 2006 patent battle against Research in Motion that resulted in a $613 million settlement to make the charges disappear. 2007 marked further legal action by NTP against AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless for similar patent infringements; however these cases remain open.

Critics of the current U.S. patent policy are less than surprised by the new lawsuits, citing a problem often encountered due to the loopholes allowing companies to collect patents for inventions they will never manufacture. These companies, fondly nicknames ‘paten trolls,’ can then profit by opportunistically suing companies that do make use of the invention.

A Senate bill is in the works to bring changes to the U.S. Patent Office, including a transition to a “first-to-file” system rather than a “first-to-invent” approach. The United States is the only major country that gives patents to those who can prove they invented an item before someone else’s patent was filed.