VVC Patent Challenges on the Horizon

The team at Unified IP Services is using Pearl to examine the quality of patents alleged to be essential to the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. Patents owned by Ideahub, Intellectual Discovery, IP Bridge, and others are being reviewed.

This project is a part of Unified’s ongoing efforts to protect and improve the quality of patents in the Video Codec SEP Zone. By analyzing the validity and/or essentiality of alleged standard essential patents, Unified seeks to deter licensors’ unreasonable licensing expectations, royalty stacking, and the assertion of invalid or non-essential patents.

ETRI video codec patent revocation remains in place

On October 13, 2025, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) withdrew their appeal of the EPO decision to revoke EP 3767952, canceling the hearing scheduled for November 11, 2025. Thus, the EP '952 stands revoked in its entirety. The EP ‘952 patent relates to an apparatus for encoding image data and an apparatus for decoding image data, where the encoding/decoding makes use of motion vector coding for image compression, particularly an inter prediction method. It is related to patents that have been designated essential to the Access Advance patent pool and has also been identified as potentially essential to the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard.

Unified was represented by Owain Summers, Andrew McGettrick, and Susan Keston at HGF Law and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Roshan Mansinghani.

Fortress Investment entity, DivX, video streaming patent challenged

On September 19, 2025, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 11,611,785, owned and asserted by DivX LLC, an NPE and entity of Fortress Investment Group LLC. The ‘785 patent is generally directed to encoding video at different bit rates and evaluating the quality to provide the lowest bitrate at which the highest quality video can be achieved for a given resolution and frame rate. It has been asserted against Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services for their provision of streaming content. The ‘785 patent is relevant to MPEG-DASH and streaming providers generally.

View district court litigations by DivX. Unified is represented by Jonathan Bowser and Adam Erickson at Haynes Boone, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Michelle Aspen, in this proceeding.

Dolby HEVC patent revocation confirmed by EPO appeal

On July 7, 2025, the EPO Board of Appeals confirmed the decision to revoke all claims of EP 3694209 B1, owned by Dolby International AB. EP ‘209 generally relates to video coding techniques that use data hiding to decrease bandwidth. The patent is related to others that have been designated essential to the Access Advance (HEVC) pool. EP ’209 has also been identified as potentially essential to the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. This filing is a part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.

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

Two Xylene video codec patents (in Sisvel's and Access Advance's pools) revocations confirmed in Japan

The Japan Intellectual Property High Court has affirmed the revocations of two patents, JP6768017 and JP6768110, owned by Xylene. The two patents are related to patents purportedly essential to HEVC Advance patent pool and SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 patent pools.

Unified was represented by Ace-ai IP Law Firm in Japan, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks.