American Patents patent held unpatentable

On August 13, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. American Patents, LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,373,655 unpatentable. The ’655 patent, directed to a method for control of access to network resources, has been asserted in multiple district court cases against such companies as TCL, LG, Samsung, Sharp, Acer, Huawei and others. 

The final written decision also included a thorough analysis related to real party-in-interest (RPI) and rejected Patent Owner's argument that a Unified member should have been named as an RPI in this proceeding. This was one in a series of decisions that have consistently found Unified to be the sole RPI.

Unified was represented by Raghav Bajaj of Haynes and Boone, and by in-house counsel, Ashraf Fawzy and Jonathan Stroud, in this proceeding. View American Patent’s district court litigation here. To read the public version of this decision and view the entire case proceeding, see Unified’s Portal.

Ortiz & Associates patent held unpatentable

On August 20, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Ortiz & Associates Consulting, LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,971,914 unpatentable. The ‘914 patent, directed to controlling a multimedia video device to play video data through the operation of a wireless device, has been asserted against Google and Roku.

Unified was represented by Jon Bowser, David O’Dell, David McCombs, and Thomas Kelton at Haynes and Boone, and by in-house counsel, Alyssa Holtslander and Jonathan Stroud, in this proceeding. View Ortiz & Associates' district court litigation here. To read the petition and view the entire case proceeding, see Unified's Portal.

Webinar Materials - PTAB Amendment Data and Practice

SPEAKERS:

Michelle Aspen – Senior Patent Counsel, Unified Patents

Trenton Ward – Partner, Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP

Our speakers from Finnegan and Unified Patents gave a comprehensive review of recent trends in IPR amendments and the best strategies in responding to motions to amend. Discussions were had about recent precedential opinions from the PTAB and the Federal Circuit regarding amendments and provided our listeners with a breakdown of the data from cases handling amendments under the new pilot program. As patent owners work to use amendments to circumnavigate the prior art, practitioners must keep themselves up to date on the best way to respond.

To listen to the recorded webinar, click here: https://vimeo.com/449814555

The slide presentation from this webinar can be seen and downloaded below.

Join us for our next webinar, The 5G Submarine and FRAND Patent Landscape, on September 24th at 12p EST. For more information, visit our website.

$2,000 for prior art on Sanderling Management

On August 18, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least all of the limitations of dependent claim 2, including all of the limitations of claim 1, of U.S. Patent 9,355,412. The ‘412 patent is owned by Sanderling Management Ltd., an NPE., and relates to forwarding a processing function, such as an overlay, to a user's mobile image processing application when the user's mobile device indicates a certain GPS reading. The ‘412 patent is currently being asserted against Snap, Inc.

APEX STANDARDS has shared US and non-US prior art as well as corresponding claim charting against the patent.

Techson IP has provided its full validity-focused Limestone|Report, the full report link is here.

The contest will expire on September 30, 2020. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.

Velos Media patent held unpatentable

On August 17, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Velos Media, LLC holding the only claim of U.S. Patent 8,767,824 unpatentable. The ‘824 patent is owned by Velos Media, LLC. Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard (such as the ‘824 patent). Unified filed this challenge as part of its ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.

The ‘824 patent and its corresponding extended patent family represents approximately 3% of Velos' known U.S. assets. The ’824 patent, generally directed to techniques for video encoding and decoding, was originally assigned to Sharp before being transferred to Velos in 2017.

Unified was represented by David Cavanaugh from WilmerHale, Theodoros Konstantakopoulos from Desmarais, 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 decision and review the case record, view IPR2019-00635 on the Portal.