Prior art found for Uniloc patent!

Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, David Heckadon, who received a cash prize of $2,000 for his prior art submission for U.S. Patent 6,470,345, owned by Uniloc, a well-known NPE. The '345 patent, directed to a file directory system, has been asserted in multiple district court cases. 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 9,544,595 owned by KAIST and ETRI

On May 29, 2019, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,544,595, owned by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. Akin Gump will serve as lead counsel.

The '595 patent and its corresponding extended patent family is one of the largest families known to be owned by KAIST and represents approximately 46.7% of KAIST’s known U.S. assets. Including this petition, Unified has now challenged patents representing 83.7% of KAIST’s total known U.S. assets.

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 IPR2019-00725 on the Portal.

All challenged claims for Universal Secure Registry patent held unpatentable

On May 1, 2019, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents Inc. v. Universal Secure Registry, LLC, IPR2018-00067, holding as unpatentable claims 1-3, 5-9, 11, 13-18, 20, and 22-26 of U.S. Patent No. 8,577,813, owned and asserted by Universal Secure Registry, LLC, a known NPE. The final written decision was made publicly available on May 31, 2019. The '813 patent, generally directed to authenticating a user using biometric and secret information provided to a user device, has been asserted against Apple and Visa. 

In the final written decision, the PTAB determined that Unified was the sole real party-in-interest (RPI) in the proceeding. 

Jason Mudd at Erise IP served as Unified’s lead counsel in this proceeding. View the complete District Court litigation here. To read the decision and to view the entire IPR proceeding, visit our PTAB Portal.

SMTM Technology patent added to PATROLL

Unified added a $2,000 contest to PATROLL seeking prior art for U.S. Patent No. 9,973,622 owned by SMTM Technology, an NPE. The '622 patent generally relates to suppressing notifications of incoming communications on a mobile device.  SMTM asserted a similarly titled patent, “Mobile Device Inactive Mode and Inactive Mode Verification,” U.S. Patent No. 8,958,853 in district court litigation.  

References similar to those Unified used in the IPR2019-00434 will not be considered.   

The contest will expire on August 31, 2019. Please visit PATROLL for more information or to submit an entry for this contest.

Data Scape patent challenged as likely invalid

On May 31, 2019, Unified, represented by DLA Piper, filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 7,720,929, owned and asserted by Data Scape Limited, an NPE. The ‘929 patent, directed to directed to controlling the transfer of digital files from one computing device to another, has been asserted against numerous companies including Amazon, Apple, Box, Citrix, Dell, Dropbox, F5 Networks, Spotify, Teradata, and Verizon.  

View Data Scape's district court litigation. To read the petition and view the entire case proceeding, see Unified's Portal.