ETRI HEVC patent revoked in EPO

On January 24, 2024, the European Patent Office announced the revocation of all claims of EP 3767952. The EP ‘952 patent, owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), relates to an apparatus for encoding image data and an apparatus for decoding image data, where the encoding/decoding makes use of motion vector coding for image compression, particularly an inter prediction method. It is related to patents that have been designated essential to the Access Advance patent pool and has also been identified as potentially essential to the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard.

Unified is represented by Harry Hutchinson and Owain Summers at HGF Law and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Roshan Mansinghani.

$2,000 for Owlpoint IP entity Universal Connectivity communications patent prior art

Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 21 of U.S. Patent 7,154,905, owned by Universal Connectivity Technologies Inc., an NPE and entity of Owlpoint IP Opportunities JVF LP. The ‘905 patent generally relates to communications techniques and particularly to communications between hosts and data store devices. The patent has been asserted against Dell, HP Inc., and Lenovo Group.

The contest will expire on March 31, 2024. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.

$2,000 for Factor 2 Multimedia authentication patent prior art

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 10,083,285, owned by Factor 2 Multimedia Systems, LLC, an NPE. The ‘285 patent generally relates to a direct authentication system and method, more particularly, to a new two-factor authentication method used by a business to authenticate its customers' identity utilizing trusted-authenticators. The patent has been asserted against ByteDance (TikTok).

The contest will expire on March 31, 2024. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.

$2,000 awarded for Biogy cybersecurity patent prior art

Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Ekta Aswal and Dinesh Swami, who split a cash award of $2,000 for their prior art submissions on 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.

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.

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IP Investments entity DigiMedia Tech H.264/AVC patent challenged

On January 24, 2024, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 6,606,287, owned by DigiMedia Tech, LLC, an NPE and an IP Investments Group entity. The ‘287 patent generally relates to recording and storing a media signal, while determining an optimal compression rate based on characteristics of the media signal while maintaining acceptable quality. The patent has been asserted against devices using H.264 / AVC from companies including Panasonic, Lenovo, OnePlus, TCT Mobile, Xiaomi, and Best Buy.

View district court litigations by DigiMedia Tech. Unified is represented by Eric Buresh and Nick Apel at Erise IP, and by in-house counsel, David Seastrunk and Roshan Mansinghani.