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USPTO Proposed Rules Flawed - The Hill Op-Ed

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In an op-ed published on "The Hill" website, Jonathan Stroud summarizes the House Judiciary oversight hearing where USPTO Director Kathi Vidal testified regarding the Office’s proposed rulemaking. 

Policy changes at administrative agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are unlikely to lead the nightly news or appear above the fold in national newspapers. But, the USPTO might be the most important agency your average American hasn’t heard of. How it works, or doesn’t, has billion-dollar consequences for the U.S. innovation economy, and for consumers.

Published on May 10, 2023, continue reading the article by clicking HERE.

Torchlight Technologies automotive patent likely invalid

On May 4, 2023, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 11,208,029, owned and asserted by Torchlight Technologies LLC, an NPE. The '029 patent is directed to a headlight system that increases light in a direction of road curvature. Torchlight has asserted the patent against several auto companies including Audi, Daimler, Mercedes-Benz USA, Porsche, Volkswagen, and GM.

View district court litigations by Torchlight Technologies. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified was represented by in-house counsel, Ellyar Barazesh and David Seastrunk, in this proceeding.

Bandspeed IoT patent reexam granted

On May 8, 2023, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,903,608, owned and asserted by Bandspeed, LLC, an NPE. The ‘608 patent is generally directed to communication devices for adaptive frequency-hopping based on channel performance. The patent has been asserted in over 20 litigations since 2014 but most recently against Renesas, Itron, Espressif Systems, TCL, ASUStek, and others.

View district court litigations by Bandspeed. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, T.J. Murphy and Roshan Mansinghani.

To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on Unified's Portal, go to https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90015194.

DynaIP entity, Silent Communication, telecom patent found invalid in reexam

On May 5, 2023, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) entered a final rejection of claim 1 of U.S. Patent 8,229,409, owned by Silent Communication, LLC, an NPE and DynaIP entity. The ’409 patent relates to recovering calls after an erroneous disconnection and has been asserted against Adobe, Fuze, Lifesize, and Zoho.

View district court litigations by Silent Communication. Unified was 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/90015109.

$2,000 awarded for Web 2.0 Technologies storage patent prior art

Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Ekta Aswal and Dinesh Swamy, who split a cash award of $2,000 for their prior art submissions on U.S. Patent 6,845,448, owned by Web 2.0 Technologies, LLC. The ‘448 patent generally relates to a method and system for gathering and storing personal information on a server computer and releasing such information to authorized requesters. It had been asserted against several companies such as Trello, Hive, Nulab, and LiquidPlanner.

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

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