Unified Consulting 5G study finds significant submarine patents

Unified Consulting (UC), a sister company to Unified Patents, recently completed a study on 5G and identified using the 5G OPAL (Objective PAtent Landscape) tool which evaluated over 1,000,000 patents for essentiality based on participation and almost 100,000 self-declared patents. It is based on the OPEN 3GPP (Standard Submission Repository) with over 200,000 3GPP / 5G contributions and a methodology using an AI based semantic similarity algorithm.

The study found a significant number of UNDECLARED patents are likely essential for 5G. They include well known companies such as Comcast, China Mobile, Coolpad, Acer, and many others. UC calls these submarine patents since FRAND may not apply to them based on some current court decisions. A table of some of these can be found in the chart below. The full article can be found here:

5G Submarine Patents

Engle Grange patent challenged as likely invalid

On August 25, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,548,645, owned by Engle Grange, LLC, an NPE. The ‘645 patent is generally directed towards a two-step key fob authentication system for an automobile. The patent is currently being asserted in litigation against Ford.

View district court litigations by Engle Grange. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, David Seastrunk and Roshan Mansinghani, in this proceeding.

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.

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