Patents

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Toronto Globe reports on Unified's in-depth portfolio analysis of Blackberry and its delayed sale to NPE

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At the beginning of 2022, BlackBerry announced that Catapult IP Innovations Inc. had agreed to buy several patents in a deal worth over $400-million dollars, but by June, the deal was off. Unified’s Director of Analytics, Sam Baird, analyzed the potential value of the divested portfolio of 37,175 patents, which would be one of the largest patent deals in the past decade. Mr. Baird has noted the buyer’s cost could exceed $900 million USD, including related maintenance costs, prosecution fees and litigation costs.

Voice Tech's PTAB rehearing request denied

On June 28, 2022, Voice Tech Corporation’s request for rehearing of IPR2020-01018 was denied by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The IPR was filed against U.S. 10,491,679 on June 5, 2020, was instituted on December 14, 2020, and received a final written decision holding all claims invalid on December 13, 2021. The ’679 patent relates to voice-activated computing. The patent is currently asserted against Mycroft AI Inc. for using open source, voice-related technologies. This denial comes after the Board previously rejected Voice Tech's precedential opinion panel (POP) request.

View Voice Tech Corp’s district court litigation. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified's Portal. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Jordan Rossen, Roshan Mansinghani, and Michelle Aspen, in this proceeding.

Canon and Unified Brands profit from deterring online counterfeiters

In court filings targeting online counterfeiters, Unified Brands ("the Anti-Counterfeiter") is working with Canon to stop the sales of counterfeit camera batteries and other accessories via online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. Canon, a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions worldwide, recognizes that sales of counterfeit goods are a huge and growing problem for businesses. As stores have migrated from physical locations to e-commerce sites—a move only accelerated by the pandemic—online sales of counterfeit goods has become a multi-trillion dollar problem for American businesses.

Continue reading to find out how Unified Brands is searching for more ways to fight off online counterfeiters HERE.

VVC's Adoption Hampered by Patent Uncertainty and Low Value

Unified Consulting’s Craig Thompson has written an article covering the potential risks and uncertainty around the adoption of Versatile Video Coding (VVC). VVC is entering a competitive codec market where its future will depend more on royalty demands than on its technical specifications. As is detailed in an VVC economic report recently published by Unified Patents and authored by Charles River Associates, VVC is faced with strong competition from MPEG's new Essential Video Codec (EVC), and existing HEVC, AVC as well as from Alliance for Open Media's Advance Video 1 codec (AV1). The royalty pricing pressure on VVC is exerted, first, by MPEG-LA's AVC pool, which is viewed by courts in the United States and in Europe as being a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rate, and, second, by AV1 and EVC, which have been developed specifically to incur less if any royalties.

Click HERE to read the rest of the article published by Streaming Media.