Omnitek Partners patent challenged as likely invalid

On September 18, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,224,569, owned by Omnitek Partners LLC, an NPE. The ’569 patent is generally directed towards a method for generating and displaying driving directions. The patent is currently being asserted in litigation against Ford, GM, Here Global B.V., Mazda, Toyota, Volvo, Apple, and Alpine Electronics.

View district court litigations by Omnitek Partners. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Alyssa Holtslander, Ashraf Fawzy, and Jonathan Stroud, in this proceeding.

Ideahub patent determined to be likely invalid

On September 17, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 9,641,849, owned by Ideahub Inc. The IPR was filed as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. The '849 patent relates to a video compression technique known as intra prediction.

The '849 patent is a part of the HEVC Advance patent pool. HEVC Advance claims that certain claims of the '849 patent are essential to the HEVC standard.

Unified is represented by Raghav Bajaj, David McCombs, and Jon Bowser from Haynes and Boone, 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 petition and review the case record, view IPR2020-00702 on Unified’s Portal.

$2,000 for prior art on inventor-owned patent, Kaufman '981

On September 16, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 7,885,981. The patent is owned by Michael Philip Kaufman, an NPE. The '981 patent generally relates to generating a user interface (UI) for a relational database, where the UI display includes various display modes.

The ‘981 patent has been asserted in district court against companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce.

In addition, the '981 patent has been subject two prior IPR proceedings. IPR2017-01141 was denied because the combination did not appear to disclose the "scanning" limitation or storing/using the scanned data. IPR2017-01142 was denied because the Petitioner tried to break the priority chain, but the PTAB did not agree, so they did not reach the merits of those references.

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

Prior Art ProviderClaim Chart Link
Apex StandardsCorresponding Claim Chart
Techson IPLimestone|Report
AmplifiedCorresponding Claim Chart
TraindexCorresponding Claim Chart

$2,500 for CDN Innovations prior art

On September 16, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 13 of U.S. Patent 6,311,180, using the preamble as a limitation. The '180 patent is owned by CDN Innovations, LLC, an NPE and entity of IPinvestments Group, and generally relates to a method that allows documents to be viewed on a plurality of devices according to the preferences of the user.

The ‘180 patent is currently being asserted against Grande Communications Networks, LLC. View CDN Innovations’s district court litigation.

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

Prior Art ProviderClaim Chart Link
Apex StandardsCorresponding Claim Chart
Techson IPLimestone|Report
AmplifiedCorresponding Claim Chart
TraindexCorresponding Claim Chart

$1,000 Awarded for Landmark Technology prior art

Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Ekta Aswal, who received a cash prize of $1,000 for prior art submitted for U.S. Patent 7,010,508. The '508 patent is owned by and asserted by Landmark Technology, LLC, and specifically relates to a means for screening loan applications, but has been broadly asserted against a variety of products and services using e-commerce systems.

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

Landmark Technology '508 chart by Jennifer M Gallagher on Scribd