Unified Portal launches AI-based prior art searching for US patents

Unified is happy to announce a new feature to quickly find prior art on US patents with our Portal tool. Through a partnership with PQAI, a researcher will receive the most relevant prior-art results to determine the novelty and obviousness of the patent in question. Unified Portal offers three ways of searching for prior art:

In our patent detail page next to the patent title, there is a button labeled "Find Prior Art". Clicking this button will provide our user with a list of potential prior art patents to review. These results will be shown in Portal’s patent search page with its corresponding query string.

Reading through the patent within Portal’s patent detail page will also give our users an opportunity to search for prior art on a specific claim they would like to research further:

The third way of searching for prior art within Portal is to search by natural language here: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/prior-art/pqai

If results are found, up to 10 results are produced to help researchers and inventors determine the novelty of their inventions. For more details or to ask questions, please email info@unifiedpatents.com.

ETRI patent challenged

On April 22, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,781,448, owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. The ‘448 patent is part of the HEVC Advance Patent Pool, as well as SISVEL's AV1 patent pool.

Unified is represented by Eric Buresh of Erise IP and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Jung Hahm, 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 IPR2021-00827 on the Portal.

Sound View '860 reexamination request granted

On April 21, 2021, the USPTO granted Unified's request for ex parte reexamination, finding substantial questions of patentability for all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,135,860, owned by Sound View Innovations, LLC. The ‘860 patent relates to data processing that transforms web content into a format suitable for display by a client device, and has been asserted against Facebook.

View district court litigations by Sound View. Unified is represented by in-house counsel Ellyar Barazesh, Ashraf Fawzy, and Jessica L.A. Marks.

To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on PAIR, go to https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, enter 90/014,713, and click on the "Image File Wrapper" tab.

5G RAN SEPs Likely to Encourage a Frenzy of Activity

The rapidly changing 5G RAN and the growth forecasts for the equipment market promises to attract 5G RAN SEP monetization. The large number and diverse ownership of 5G RAN SEPs should encourage a frenzy of monetization activity.

As of January 2021, nearly 33,000 active patent families have been self-declared to 5G. Of those families, over 63% or 20,750 families have been self-declared specifically to 5G RAN infrastructure. These families comprise nearly 70,000 active patents and applications. The pie chart below developed from Unified Patents’ objective patent landscaping tool (OPAL) shows the top 20 ownership of those families.

Continue reading the full article on IPWatchdog’s website HERE. This article is the second part in a series written by Craig Thompson, General Manager and COO for Unified Consulting.

Caselas, a Raymond Anthony Joao entity, patent challenged

On April 15, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,715,691, which is being asserted by Caselas, LLC, a Raymond Anthony Joao entity. The '691 patent is generally directed to providing transaction history information including charge-back information.

Caselas is asserting the '691 patent against 25 banks and merchant services companies, including First Citizens Bank, UBS Bank, First National Bank of Omaha, TruWest Credit Union, and Electronic Merchant Systems.

View district court litigations by Caselas. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by Larissa Bifano and Zach Conrad of DLA Piper and by in-house counsel, Ashraf Fawzy and Jordan Rossen, in this proceeding.