$2,500 for VoiceAge EVS '710 Prior Art

On September 2, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claims 16 and 24 of U.S. Patent 7,693,710. This patent is owned by VoiceAge EVS, LLC, which is associated with Fortress Investment Group LLC, an NPE. The '710 patent relates to concealment of frame erasure caused by frames of an encoded sound signal erased during transmission from an encoder to a decoder.

According to the complaint, these patents are essential to the EVS Standard. The ‘710 patent is currently being asserted against Apple, Lenovo, TCL, and HMD Global. View VoiceAge ‘710 district court litigation.

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.

Amplified has provided a list of highly relevant invalidity search results for interested professionals to quickly begin search and analysis work. 

Traindex, a machine learning enabled search service, has provided an ordered list of most semantically similar patent documents where results are filtered to include only results with the publication date preceding that of the patent being challenged.

The contest will expire on October 31, 2020. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.

FireNet Technologies patent determined to be likely invalid

On September 1, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against  U.S. Patent 8,892,600, owned and asserted by FireNet Technologies, LLC, an IP Investments affiliate and well-known NPE.  The ’600 patent, generally directed to a proxy firewall system for protecting devices within a network. FireNet had previously sued Kemp Technologies, Fortinet, Citrix, A10 Networks, and Fujitsu (now terminated).

View FireNet’s district court litigation. 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.

$1,000 Awarded for Ortiz & Associates '299 prior art

Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Shalini Bansal and Rajesh Singh, who split a cash prize of $1,000 for their prior art submissions for U.S. Patent 9,147,299. The '299 patent generally relates to streaming media. The patent is owned by Ortiz & Associates, LLC, and is currently being asserted in U.S. district court against Roku, Panasonic, Microsoft, and Hisense.

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

• U.S. 5,838,926

• U.S. 7,076,255

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.