NEWS & VIEWS
Unified News, Views, & Blogs
On October 1, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,953,816, owned by MicroParing Technologies LLC, an NPE. The '816 patent is currently being asserted against Toyota and GM and is directed to connecting wireless audio devices to in-vehicle audio systems.
View district court litigations by MicroPairing. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Alyssa Holtslander and Ashraf Fawzy.
On September 29, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 7,200,613 owned by Paradise IP, LLC, an NPE and IP Edge entity. The ’613 patent relates to asset management databases and has been asserted against 15 companies such as Spotify, Box, Iron Mountain, Citrix Systems, and others.
View district court litigations by Paradise IP. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Jordan Rossen and Ashraf Fawzy.
On September 22, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Targeted Radio LLC holding claims 1 and 3-9 of U.S. Patent 8,948,684 invalid. Targeted Radio LLC is an affiliate of well-known NPE Acacia Research Corporation. The ’684 patent is generally directed to the insertion of advertising or other content into an Internet radio stream based on the user's location. This patent was asserted against Pandora Media, but the case was terminated in 2020.
Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Jessica Marks and Jung Hahm, in this proceeding. View Targeted Radio’s district court litigation. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified's Portal.
2021 is current through September 8, 2021
Institution decisions are generally down in 2021 to date, compared to previous years. Nonetheless, the USPTO’s use of procedural denials rivals last year’s. In 2020, nearly 19% of all institution decisions were denied procedurally, whereas this year, over 16% are denied—over 144 of the 377 denials to date have been denied under the Board’s discretion. In other words, almost 40% of all denials this year have been non-substantive.
A total of 105 decisions were made on the basis 314(a) and 31 decisions were made on the basis of 325(a). The 105 314(a) denials accounts for 73% of all denials. That is, compared to 2019 in total, no change—in 2019, 314(a) denials accounted for roughly 73% as well.
Over 94% of all procedural denials this year stem from either 314(a) or 325(d). In 2020, 88.5% of denials stemmed from these from 314(a) or 325(d). This year has seen a 5.5% increase from last year.
Section 314(a) denials are now used by the Board roughly 12.4% of the time, an 0.2% increase from last quarter.
Meanwhile, 325(d) denials have slightly increased to 5.7% from the year-over-year average of 5%.
NHK Spring/Fintiv continues to be the dominant framework of 314(a) denials. This year has seen 77, nearly reaching the previous-year high of 85. NHK Spring/Fitniv accounts for 73% of all 314(a), whereas in 2020 only 51% were based on the Fintiv framework. This is a 23% increase from last year.
On September 16, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Ideahub Inc. holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 9,641,849 invalid and denied the motion to amend. The IPR was filed as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. The '849 patent relates to a video compression technique known as intra prediction.
The '849 patent is a part of the Access Advance patent pool. Access Advance claims that certain claims of the '849 patent are essential to the HEVC standard.
Unified is represented by Raghav Bajaj, David McCombs, and Jon Bowser from Haynes and Boone, and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Ashraf Fawzy, in this proceeding. Visit Unified’s Portal for more information about its Video Codec landscape (OPAL) and standard submission repository (OPEN). To read the petition and review the case record, view IPR2020-00702 on Unified’s Portal.
