Wi-Fi SEP Zone launched by Unified

Unified Patents is happy to announce a new zone to deter patent abuse in the Standard Essential Patent (SEP) space through its newly launched Wi-Fi 6 Zone. This new Zone brings together a fast-growing network of members to address asymmetries in licensing Wi-Fi 6 standard essential patents and creates a fair and transparent patent licensing process around core patents supporting the next wave of consumer technology growth.

The current Wi-Fi patent landscape is complicated, to say the least. Sisvel’s launched Wi-Fi 6 pool, composed mostly of Huawei patents, constitutes less than 14% of the SEPs needed based on our OPAL Landscape tool at the time of posting.  Also, implementing Wi-Fi 6 requires licenses to Wi-Fi 1-5. However, only one common licensor exists between Sisvel’s Wi-Fi 1-5 and Wi-Fi 6 pools - Philips.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi 6 will represent almost $265B, or nearly one-third, of Wi-Fi-Enabled GDP by 2025. Given these economic implications and the ubiquitous nature of Wi-Fi in our everyday lives, members need the tools and data necessary to negotiate FRAND licenses in good faith.

Zone members get access to Unified’s tools – the Wi-Fi landscaping (OPAL) tool and the standard submission (OPEN) tool. Unified has also commissioned an economic report (OVAL) to determine FRAND for Wi-Fi 6, due out Q2 2023.

Unified’s OPAL tool objectively scores the statistical essentiality of patent publications to Wi-Fi 6 functionality. Experts manually evaluated over three thousand patent families to create the AI training set and scored them all for statistical essentiality. Full-text search is available via patent, application number, family ID, filing date, etc.

Unified’s OPEN tool provides an indexed and full-text searchable repository of all 122,000 IEEE Wi-Fi submissions, including the 7000+ technical submissions to the Wi-Fi 6 working group.

Finally, Unified’s OVAL tool is a commissioned economic report to determine a Wi-Fi 6 FRAND. Using Innovatio, similar cases, and the likely changes in Wi-Fi 6 chip prices, the economic report will determine the incremental value of new Wi-Fi 6 applications and products. 

Unified Patents’ SEP Wi-Fi 6 zone provides members with the tools and data necessary for impactful FRAND negotiations and to deter invalid or unessential assertions.

Two ETRI European Video Codec patents held invalid

The European Patent Office revoked all claims of EP 3448035 and EP 3448036, both owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). EP’035 and EP’036 relate to determining whether, when decoding, to apply filters to intra-prediction values based on the intra-prediction mode and the size of the block being decoded. The patents are part of a large family with related patents designated as essential to the H.265 and AV1 standards by Access Advance and SISVEL, respectively.

Unified was represented by Andrew McGettrick and Susan Keston from HGF Law, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks, Roshan Mansinghani, and Michelle Aspen.

III Holdings grid computing patent prior art found

Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 9,135,066, owned by Intellectual Ventures subsidiary and NPE, III Holdings 12, LLC. The '066 patent relates to a system and method for managing access to compute resources in the context of a grid or cluster of computers. Grid computing may be defined as coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional collaborations.

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

Fill out the form below to download the winning submission:

Topia Technology file sharing patent likely invalid

On November 17, 2022, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 10,067,942, owned by Topia Technology, Inc., an NPE. The ‘942 patent relates to automatic file sharing across a distributed network. It has been asserted against Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte, among other co-defendants.

View district court litigations by Topia Technology. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by in-house counsel Michelle Aspen and Roshan Mansinghani.

III Holdings '972 patent prior art found

Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 8,150,972, owned by Intellectual Ventures subsidiary and NPE, III Holdings 12, LLC. The '972 patent relates to a system, method, and computer-readable media for providing a reservation mask for compute resources such as a cluster or a grid.

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

Fill out the form below to download the winning submission: