Another Sovereign Peak Ventures patent challenged

On May 3, 2021, continuing in the ongoing efforts in the SEP Video Codec Zone, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 6,877,038, owned by Sovereign Peak Ventures, a Dominion Harbor entity. The ’038 patent relates to video processing and has been asserted against LG and TCL.

View district court litigations by Sovereign Peak Ventures. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by Raghav Bajaj of Haynes and Boone, LLP and by in-house counsel, Ashraf Fawzy, Jung Hahm, and Roshan Mansinghani, in this proceeding.

$1,500 Awarded for 21st Century Garage prior art

Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Preeti Dua, who received a cash prize of $1,500 for her prior art submission for U.S. Patent 6,526,460. The ‘460 patent, formerly owned by Intellectual Ventures, is owned by 21st Century Garage, LLC, an NPE. The '460 patent generally relates to a vehicle communications system, in particular for a motor vehicle, having a plurality of equipment units for transmitting, receiving, acquiring and/or processing data for executing applications.

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

• US 4715031

21st Century Garage PATROLL Winning Submission - DCS Edits by Jennifer M Gallagher on Scribd

BCS Software reexamination request granted

On April 30, 2021, the USPTO granted Unified's request for ex parte reexamination, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims on U.S. Patent 7,302,612, owned by BCS Software LLC. The '612 patent relates to a high-level operational support framework for monitoring, assessing, and managing the health of applications (or components/objects) in a distributed computing environment. The ‘612 patent has been asserted against Hewlett Packard, Elster Solutions (Honeywell), Landis+Gyr, and Itron.

View district court litigations by BCS Software. Unified is represented by in-house counsel David Seastrunk and Ashraf Fawzy.

To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on PAIR, go to https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, enter 90/014,709, and click on the "Image File Wrapper" tab.

BCS Software Reexam Grant by Jennifer M Gallagher on Scribd

GE Video Compression patent challenged

On April 30, 2021, continuing in the ongoing efforts in the SEP Video Codec Zone, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination against U.S. Patent 6,795,583 owned by GE Video Compression LLC (GEVC). The ‘583 patent is purportedly essential to the H.265 and AV1 standards and is part of the HEVC Advance patent pool as well as SISVEL’s video codec patent pool.

Unified is represented by Theodoros Konstantakopoulos and Christian Dorman of Desmarais, and in-house counsel, Ashraf Fawzy and Jessica L.A. Marks, in this proceeding. Visit Unified’s Public Portal for more information about its Video Codec landscape (OPAL) and standard submission repository (OPEN).

To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on PAIR, go to https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, enter 90/014,743, and click on the "Image File Wrapper" tab.

583 GEVC Patent Ex Parte Request FINAL by Jennifer M Gallagher on Scribd

PATROLL Success: Defeating Low Quality Patents

In 2020, Unified Patents launched several strategic relationships with prior art vendors to increase the quality of the submissions for PATROLL. These vendors, Apex Standards, Techson IP, Amplified, Traindex, InQuartik, IPscreener, and now Google, have led to not only more submissions but high-quality prior art being announced against NPEs on a monthly basis. 

In 2018, there were 337 total submissions for various PATROLL contests. In 2019, that number dropped to 282. However, in 2020 that number climbed back up by nearly 40% to 389 submissions. 

The increase in submissions allowed for more winners to be identified. While 2018 and 2019 saw only 11 and 18 announcements, 2020 had 24. This was a 50% increase from 2019. With 20 active contests and a new prior art tool that Unified has launched, that number is expected to be even higher.

Interestingly, the addition of using the various vendors led to 282 unique submissions last year. This would account for nearly 73% of all submissions last year. Of these 282 submissions, 40 were identified as winning submissions. It should be noted that many times, multiple submissions are used for a contest winner. 

Of these 40 submissions, nearly half of them came from one or several of the prior art reports provided by the various vendors. By establishing these relationships with the vendors, it aided our searchers in finding high-quality art to defeat low-quality patents. PATROLL is just one of many tools that Unified provides in helping to improve patent quality.