Blockchain Zone launches with support from COPA to deter Patent Trolls

We are pleased to announce that the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a non-profit community of 20+ companies formed to help adoption of cryptocurrency through cross-licensing and encouraging, is now a member of Unified’s Transactions and Blockchain Zones.

With COPA’s support, Unified is launching the Blockchain Zone to target NPE/patent troll activity in related technologies. Several Unified members are also expanding membership to support the Blockchain Zone. Unified now will deter invalid NPE assertions in the Blockchain space through challenges, crowdsourcing (PATROLL) and publishing prior art, and obtaining no-money settlements from NPEs.

Unified has successfully challenged over 100 NPE patents that threatened electronic transactions, online bill payments, authentication, and other technologies in the Transactions Zone. COPA is joining 300+ other companies committed to deterring the assertion of bad patents by non-practicing entities (NPEs). 

The full announcement can be found here:

https://www.opencrypto.org/2024-10-01-copa-uniified-patents-partnership/

Wi-Fi SEP Zone launched by Unified

Unified Patents is happy to announce a new zone to deter patent abuse in the Standard Essential Patent (SEP) space through its newly launched Wi-Fi 6 Zone. This new Zone brings together a fast-growing network of members to address asymmetries in licensing Wi-Fi 6 standard essential patents and creates a fair and transparent patent licensing process around core patents supporting the next wave of consumer technology growth.

The current Wi-Fi patent landscape is complicated, to say the least. Sisvel’s launched Wi-Fi 6 pool, composed mostly of Huawei patents, constitutes less than 14% of the SEPs needed based on our OPAL Landscape tool at the time of posting.  Also, implementing Wi-Fi 6 requires licenses to Wi-Fi 1-5. However, only one common licensor exists between Sisvel’s Wi-Fi 1-5 and Wi-Fi 6 pools - Philips.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi 6 will represent almost $265B, or nearly one-third, of Wi-Fi-Enabled GDP by 2025. Given these economic implications and the ubiquitous nature of Wi-Fi in our everyday lives, members need the tools and data necessary to negotiate FRAND licenses in good faith.

Zone members get access to Unified’s tools – the Wi-Fi landscaping (OPAL) tool and the standard submission (OPEN) tool. Unified has also commissioned an economic report (OVAL) to determine FRAND for Wi-Fi 6, due out Q2 2023.

Unified’s OPAL tool objectively scores the statistical essentiality of patent publications to Wi-Fi 6 functionality. Experts manually evaluated over three thousand patent families to create the AI training set and scored them all for statistical essentiality. Full-text search is available via patent, application number, family ID, filing date, etc.

Unified’s OPEN tool provides an indexed and full-text searchable repository of all 122,000 IEEE Wi-Fi submissions, including the 7000+ technical submissions to the Wi-Fi 6 working group.

Finally, Unified’s OVAL tool is a commissioned economic report to determine a Wi-Fi 6 FRAND. Using Innovatio, similar cases, and the likely changes in Wi-Fi 6 chip prices, the economic report will determine the incremental value of new Wi-Fi 6 applications and products. 

Unified Patents’ SEP Wi-Fi 6 zone provides members with the tools and data necessary for impactful FRAND negotiations and to deter invalid or unessential assertions.