On December 13, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. NavBlazer, LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 9,885,782 invalid. NavBlazer is associated with patent attorney and prolific inventor, Raymond Anthony Joao. Along with Caselas, GreatGigz Solutions, Joao Control and Monitoring Systems, and Joao Bock Transaction Systems, his companies have launched dozens of lawsuits against technologies ranging from streaming video to financial transactions. The ’782 patent is directed to vehicle navigation systems that provide information about a route and has been asserted against TomTom, Apple, Samsung, LG, Motorola Mobility, and Hyundai for their devices that provide vehicle navigation.
View NavBlazer’s district court litigation. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified's Portal. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Ashraf Fawzy, and James Stein from Lee & Hayes in this proceeding.
Access Advance, Who is Checking Essentiality? -- An HEVC Case Study
Some patent holders and pools designate their patents as relevant or essential to a standard without proper scrutiny or analysis. As part of an ongoing series examining this dubious practice, we highlight U.S. Patent 9,838,714. The ‘714 patent is owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), is purportedly essential to the H.265 (HEVC) standard as part of the Access Advance Patent Pool, and is part of a family of at least 29 applications globally. It should not be considered essential.
The ‘714 patent is directed to the prediction phase of video coding, specifically, how to scan the decoded signals during intra-prediction. In this process, there is a specific order in which the values of a block (e.g., a 4x4 or 8x8 transform block) are processed. The ‘714 patent requires that the first row or column is scanned first, before any other column or row. See, e.g., claim 1 (“scanning entropy-decoded signals of a first row with priority so that all of the entropy-decoded signals of the first row are scanned prior to scanning entropy-decoded signals of any other row”).
In contrast, the HEVC standard does the opposite. As illustrated below, the HEVC standard requires scanning in “reverse order,” meaning that the last row is scanned first (from right to left) or the last column is scanned first (from bottom to top). See HEVC, § 7.3.8.11.
See T.Nguyen, “Transform coding techniques in HEVC,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 7, no. 6, 978-989, Dec. 2013. The HEVC standard can scan in the diagonal (§ 6.5.3), horizontal (§ 6.5.4), or vertical (§ 6.5.5) directions for intra-mode prediction, but again, it does so in the “reverse order” direction, not the direction claimed by the ’714 patent.
Thus, the ‘714 patent does not appear to be essential to the HEVC standard even though it has been declared essential and actively licensed as being so. The public would benefit from appropriate scrutiny of such large patent pools that allegedly cover critical technical standards.
Voice Tech patent held invalid
On December 13, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Voice Tech Corporation holding all claims of U.S. Patent 10,491,679 invalid. The ’679 patent relates to remotely controlling a computer's operating system and applications using voice commands from a mobile device. The patent was asserted against Mycroft AI Inc. for using open source, voice-related technologies.
View Voice Tech Corp’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, Jordan Rossen and Roshan Mansinghani, in this proceeding.
$2,000 for Buffalo Patents prior art
On December 10, 2021, 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 7,187,670. The patent is owned by Buffalo Patents, an NPE. The '670 patent generally relates to a communication terminal for Internet telephony. The patent is being asserted against ZTE, HTC, TCL, Coolpad Group, and OnePlus.
The contest will expire on March 31, 2022. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.
IP Edge affiliate Karamelion patent invalidated
On December 9, 2021, the USPTO issued a notice of intent to issue a reexamination certificate, canceling all claims of U.S. Patent 6,275,166, owned by Karamelion LLC, an NPE and affiliate of IP Edge. The ‘166 patent relates to relaying communications to appliances from a central computer and has been asserted in over 40 district court litigations. The reexamination certificate took less than a year to issue.
View district court litigations by Karamelion. Unified is represented by in-house counsel Michelle Aspen and Roshan Mansinghani.
To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on Unified's Portal, go to https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90019009.