2BCom Bluetooth connections patent held invalid on rehearing

On January 10, 2023, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) reversed an earlier judgement and found all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,127,210, owned by 2BCom, LLC, unpatentable. The ’210 patent is generally directed to management of Bluetooth connections and was asserted against BMW, TP-Link, FCA, Amazon, KIA Motors, Logitech, and Walmart.

The Board agreed on rehearing that the evidence as a whole establishes that non-patent references used in Unified's challenge qualify as prior art printed publications. This included a paper that was published by the IEEE and a Bluetooth standards document. Upon determining that the references qualify as printed publications, the Board found that the challenged claims were unpatentable. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified's Portal. See also 2BCom’s district court litigation. Unified was represented by Jon Bowser and Angela Oliver of Haynes and Boone, and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Alyssa Holtslander, in this proceeding.

AlterWAN final decision affirmed by Federal Circuit

On November 14, 2022, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Office's final decision, in a summary Rule 36 affirmance, confirmed that AlterWAN, Inc.’s U.S. Patent 9,667,534 was unpatentable. The ‘534 patent, directed to routing packets via VPN, had been asserted in district court litigation against Amazon Web Services.

View AlterWAN's district court litigation. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified's Portal. Unified was represented by Angela Oliver, Raghav Bajaj, and Debbie McComas of Haynes and Boone and by in-house counsel, Jordan Rossen, Ashraf Fawzy, and Jessica L.A. Marks, in this proceeding.

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GEVC EP'416 and EP'179 successfully challenged at the EPO

On May 19, 2022, all of the original claims of EP 3 471 416 and EP 3 487 179, owned by GE Video Compression LLC (GEVC), were found unpatentable based on two separate challenges filed by Unified. Only after several failed attempts to amend the claims was GEVC able to gain allowance by adding significant narrowing limitations to the claims. The two EP patents were related to U.S. patents that are designated essential to the Access Advance (previously HEVC Advance) patent pool and Sisvel's AV1 and VP9 pools.

Only after several failed attempts to amend was GEVC able to gain allowance of significantly narrowed claims. These amendments affect the essentiality for both sets of claims. For example, the claims of both patents now require for a "transform coefficient block,” context adaptive entropy decoding that uses contexts “selected…depending on a number of positions at which according to the previously extracted and associated first-type syntax elements significant transform coefficients are situated in a predetermined neighborhood” where "the predetermined neighborhood” is “inside” (for EP’416) or “within” (for EP’179) "the transform coefficient block." But the H.265 standard considers only whether another neighborhood has a significant coefficient (not the significant coefficients within the same transform coefficient block) and provides that information via a single sub-block flag (not a specific number). See Section 9.3.4.2.5. Moreover, although the H.264 standard used a technique of keeping track of the number of previously decoded syntax elements, the claims explicitly recite that “the transform coefficient block is larger than 8x8,” and H.264 only handles blocks up to 8x8.

Unified was represented by Dr. Andrew McGettrick and Dr. Susan Keston of HGF Law LLP, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Roshan Mansinghani.