Patent Trolls Will Prey on SMEs if USPTO Proposals Proceed

Blog post originally published on August 30, 2023, by Patent Progress, written by Unified’s Co-Founder & COO, Shawn Ambwani.

USPTO’s proposed restrictions on validity review would hurt SMEs by limiting independent third parties interested in deterring patent trolls’ use of invalid patents. Unified's Shawn Ambwani provides third-party examples that have successfully challenged especially egregious patent trolls which would no longer be allowed if ANPRM proposals or the PREVAIL Act are enacted. Patent trolls will be more aggressive, more profitable, and more rampant, imposing what amounts to a legal tax on economic growth and innovation, especially against SMEs who do not have the financial resources to fight.

Continue reading this blog piece published on Patent Progress HERE.

IFPower wireless charging patent challenge instituted

On August 23, 2023, less than two months after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding a substantial new question of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,298,361, owned and asserted by IFPower Co., Ltd. The '361 patent generally relates to a non-contact inductance circuit for a power source, e.g., for use in wireless charging devices. The patent is currently being asserted against products that are Qi-compatible and/or implement the Qi standard from Apple and Samsung.

View district court litigations by IFPower. Unified is represented by Eric Buresh and Nick Apel at Erise IP, and by in-house counsel, David Seastrunk and Michelle Aspen.

To view the reexamination request, visit Unified’s Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90015255

Proposed USPTO Rules and Legislation Would Increase Government Costs

Recently proposed rulemaking and legislation would increase discretionary denial of institution of inter partes review (IPR) matters based on the criteria set forth in the Apple, Inc. v Fintiv, Inc. (Fintiv) matter and similar provisions. The Fintiv guidelines and related restrictions can make it difficult for claims to be fully considered even in cases where there is a substantial probability of success for the petitioner. If the proposed guidelines were implemented, the result would be a reduction in IPR proceedings even for cases that are otherwise meritorious. As a consequence, the economic efficiency benefits associated with the IPR process would be substantially diminished.

An additional issue with reducing IPR is that it will lead to higher costs of procurement for the US government. The Perryman Group estimates that the direct increased costs to the federal government associated with federal spending over the 2023-32 period would be -$106.4 million.

When summed with the estimated tax effects previously described, the total cost to the federal government was found to be almost -$202.9 million.

For more details please refer to the full report.

GEVC patent in SISVEL AV1 pool appears not essential

As part of an ongoing series examining the patent holders and pools erroneously designating patents as essential, we highlight U.S. Patent 10,460,344 titled “Region merging and coding parameter reuse via merging.” This patent is owned by GE Video Compression (GEVC). GEVC has designated the ’344 patent as essential to the AV1 standard as a part of SISVEL’s AV1 Patent Pool. See AV1 Patent List, AV1 Family AV1-040, available at https://www.sisvel.com/images/documents/Video-Coding-Platform/PatentList_AV1.pdf.

GEVC’s U.S. Patent 10,460,344 should not be considered to be essential to the AV1 standard. The ’344 patent is directed to a decoder that uses a merging or grouping of simply connected regions using a reduced amount of data. ’344 patent, Abstract. Namely, a merge indicator indicates whether a region currently being decoded should be reconstructed based on a motion coding parameter. If the indicator indicates copying, the appropriate vector is copied. If the indicator indicates compute, the appropriate motion vector is computed.  Id., claims 1, 9, 17, 26. 

The concept of a merge indicator is an evolved form of motion vector competition. See, e.g., Joel Jung and Guillaume Laroche, “Competition-Based Scheme for Motion Vector Selection and Coding,” VCEG Contribution VCEG-AC06r1, Klagenfurt, Austria, July 2006. In contrast to the ’344 patent and prior motion vector competition literature, the AV1 standard does not employ a merge indicator; rather, the concepts of merging and computing a motion vector is spread over multiple values, not merely an indicator to either copy the ap or compute the motion vector.  See, e.g., AV1 §§ 5.11.26 (assign_mv syntax code used to limit the maximum size of motion vectors); 5.11.23 (syntax); 6.10.22 (semantics describing new_mv, zero_mv, and ref_mv);. 

Thus, the ’344 patent does not appear to be essential to the AV1 standard despite being declared as essential. The public would benefit from appropriate scrutiny of patent pools that allegedly cover critical technical standards, particularly open-source standards such as AV1.

$2,000 for Biogy cybersecurity patent prior art

A new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, was added seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 7,669,236, owned by Biogy, Inc., an NPE. The ‘236 patent specification generally relates to cybersecurity and preventing access to an entity by unauthorized entities. A generated passcode is received by another system, which authenticates the passcode by at least generating a passcode from a passcode generator, and comparing the generated passcode with the received passcode.

The contest will expire on October 31, 2023. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.