Unified files amicus brief defending the constitutionality of PTAB judges

On March 11 Unified, joined by HP Inc. and Engine Advocacy, filed an amicus brief with the Federal Circuit in Affinity Labs of Texas, LLC v. Netflix to defend the constitutionality of the appointment of all PTAB administrative patent judges. Affinity Labs of Texas, who has sued more than 20 diverse companies such as Ford, Blackberry, the NHL, and Nike and has unsuccessfully appealed other patents canceled under 35 U.S.C. § 101, brought the constitutional argument up for the first time on appeal.  Unified's brief demonstrates the history of PTAB appointments, from the "Duffy fix" to the current broad power of the USPTO Director to oversee the proceedings and the APJs.  The U.S. Government intervened, and Unified's brief supports their position. 

The brief is available below. More information about this case can be found on Unified’s Portal.



Prior art found for GTX Corp patent!

Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Sachin Srivastava, who received a cash prize of $2,000 for his prior art submission for U.S. Patent 7,177,838, owned by GTX Corp., an NPE. The '838 patent, directed toward electronic commerce using electronic tokens, has been asserted against dozens of companies in district court litigation. To help the industry fight bad patents, we have published the winning prior art below.

We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests. Visit PATROLL today to learn more about how to participate.

WINNING SUBMISSION

Unified files IPR against US 9,014,494 owned by Velos Media, LLC

On March 18, 2019, Unified filed a petition (with Baker Botts serving as lead counsel) for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent No. 9,014,494, owned by Velos Media, LLC (Velos), as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.

The '494 patent and its corresponding extended patent family is one of the largest families known to be owned by Velos. Including this petition, Unified has now challenged patents representing 29% of Velos’ total known U.S. assets.

Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard. The family of the '494 patent, originally assigned to Panasonic Corporation, was transferred to Velos Media in 2017.  After conducting an independent analysis, Unified has determined that the '494 patent is likely unpatentable.

Visit Unified’s Public 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 IPR2019-00749 on the Portal.

Google Patents now includes Unified PTAB and District Court litigation data

This collaboration incorporates all PTAB and district court litigation (supplied by Maxval) from Unified’s Portal and its new BigQuery deployment into the events area of Google’s patent search for any patent which has been in dispute. Unified is only entity providing completely free, public accessibility to this information. For example, a Dominion Harbor Patent US6014089 was recently found mostly invalid and the PTAB information can be seen in the events section. In addition, Unified’s Portal contains detailed information regarding all PTAB and district court filings as well as a suite of analytics tools to assess the best patent law firms, NPE activity, examiner reports, and much more. Anyone can view the information through Google Patents and our Portal.

SIGN UP FOR A FREE PORTAL ACCOUNT

Interested in using this data for your research? Reach out to us at info@unifiedpatents.com for more information.

Multiple claims for First-Class Monitoring (Dominion Harbor) patent held unpatentable by PTAB

On March 13, 2019, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents Inc. v. First Class Monitoring, LLC IPR2017-01932 invalidating claims 1-5, 7, 9, 10 and 16-22 of U.S. Patent 6,014,089 owned and asserted by First Class Monitoring, LLC, a Dominion Harbor subsidiary and a well-known NPE. The '089 patent, directed to transmitting data via conventional SMS messages over a control channel of a personal communications system transmission protocol, has been asserted against various financial services companies such as Citigroup, Bank of America, USAA, JP Morgan, and PNC.

Lionel Lavenue and Brandon Rash at Finnegan served as Unified’s lead counsel in this proceeding. View all of First-Class Monitoring’s District Court litigation here. To read the decision, visit Unified’s PTAB Portal.