$2,000 for Wepay Global Payment prior art

On November 29, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on U.S. Design Patent D930702. The design patent is owned by Wepay Global Payment, LLC, an NPE and William Grecia entity. The patent describes the ornamental design for a display screen portion with animated graphical user interface. It is currently being asserted against Samsung, PayPal, and PNC Bank.

The contest will expire on January 31, 2022. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.

Prior Art Provider	Claim Chart Link
Apex Standards	Pseudo Claim Charting
Techson IP	Limestone|Report
Traindex	Prior Art Report
Google	Similar Documents - Patents
Google	Similar Documents - NPL

BCS Software patent invalidated

On November 26, 2021, the USPTO issued a notice of intent to issue a reexamination certificate, cancelling all claims of 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. The final office action was issued approximately 7 months from when the reexamination was ordered.

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 Unified's Portal, go to https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90014709.

ETRI reexamination request granted

On November 30, 2021, less than one month after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 10,244,252, owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. The ‘252 patent is part of the HEVC Advance Patent Pool, as well as SISVEL's AV1 patent pool.

Visit Unified’s Portal for more information about its Video Codec landscape (OPAL) and standard submission repository (OPEN). To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on Unified's Portal, go to https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90019030. Unified is represented by Drew Sommer at Greenberg Traurig and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Jung Hahm.

Comprehensive Empirical Study on Multiple SSO IPR Policy Revisions Shows No Effect On Participation

In a new study by Boston University’s Timothy Simcoe and Qing Zhang from Charles River Associates (using support from Unified’s OPEN platform and Edge / Patent Quality Initiative), the pair researched the impact of changes to Standard Setting Organization (SSO) intellectual property rights (IPR) policies on participation, standardization, and innovation for two well-known IPR policy revisions: a 2003 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) switch from Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) to Royalty-Free licensing and a 2015 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IPR policy revision. The study found these changes resulted in little or no measurable decline in participation or innovation in patent-intensive parts of either SSO. The results held for both the W3C and IEEE across numerous measures and “treatment” vs “control” group comparisons. These quantitative findings appear to contradict the theory that revisions to licensing policy alter participation in any meaningful way.

To download the entire article, visit SSRN HERE.

Arsus final decision affirmed by Federal Circuit

On November 16, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit summarily affirmed the PTAB’s ruling that Arsus's disclaimer of all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 10,259,494 should be treated as a request for adverse judgment in a summary affirmance under Rule 36, effectively ending the longstanding assertion of those claims. In January 2021, the Board entered adverse judgment against Arsus in IPR2020-00948, Unified Patents, LLC v. Arsus, LLC, in response to Arsus disclaiming all challenged claims. Arsus's counsel filed a Motion to Vacate Judgment arguing that the Board was deprived of subject matter jurisdiction after Arsus's disclaimer. The Board issued an order denying Arsus's motion to vacate and affirming termination of the proceeding.

The ‘494 patent is generally directed towards a rollover prevention apparatus for an automobile. The ‘494 patent has previously been asserted against Tesla Motors. Prior patents in this family were asserted in a case against a BMW dealership in Utah (dismissed on non-infringement).

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