NEWS & VIEWS
Unified News, Views, & Blogs
On July 2, 2020, the Federal Circuit affirmed Unified Patents' IPR2018-00096 and dismissed as moot the appeals for two other unrelated IPRs. The opinion, written by Judges Lourie, Dyk, and Chen, held that all claims at issue in U.S. Patent 6,125,371, owned by Sound View Innovations, LLC, were invalid. To date, Unified has never lost an appeal before the Federal Circuit.
The opinion can be found below. To review the case record, view IPR2018-00096 on the Portal.
Unified v Sound View Writte... by Jennifer M Gallagher on Scribd
On June 30, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 9,414,066, owned by Velos Media, LLC. The ’066 patent is directed to video decoding techniques and was originally assigned to Ericsson before being transferred to Velos in 2018.
Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard (such as the ‘066 patent). Unified filed this challenge as part of its ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone after independently determining that the allegedly standard essential ‘066 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 IPR2020-00352 on the Portal.
On June 30, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 10,311,073, owned and asserted by MasterObjects, Inc., an NPE. The ‘073 patent is directed to partial search technology, including asynchronous retrieval of information from a database. MasterObjects has filed suit involving the '073 patents and others against several companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and eBay.
View district court litigation by MasterObjects. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by Trenton Ward and Gracie Mills from Finnegan and Unified’s in-house counsel, Ashraf Fawzy and Jung Hahm, in this proceeding.
The apparent shutdown has not deterred a significant rise in Aggregators and Finance-backed entities along with increasing litigation being filed in the Western District of Texas. This has driven cases in Q2 to the highest since Q4 of 2016. Several NPEs have shown new strategies such as WSOU Investments who has focused on filing a large number of single patent cases against tech companies. It is not surprising though once one realizes that the CEO was previously heading Uniloc, a well known NPE who was a profligate filer. In addition the PTAB saw a modest increase compared to previous quarters and Unified Patents was the #3 overall.
On June 30, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 7,370,085, owned and asserted by Quartz Auto Technologies, LLC, an NPE. The ‘085 patent is generally directed to personal information management systems that track a user’s locations and activities. The patent is currently being asserted against Uber and Lyft for their rider/passenger applications.
View district court litigation by Quartz Auto Technologies. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by Unified’s in-house counsel, Alyssa Holtslander and Jessica Marks, in this proceeding.
