$2,000 awarded for Songbird Tech audio patent prior art

Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Mani Manikandan and Ekta Aswal, who split a cash award of $2,000 for their prior art submissions on U.S. Patent 8,825,787, owned by Songbird Tech, LLC, an NPE. The ‘787 patent relates to an audio message-driven customer interaction queuing system for any public web page to allow web page visitors to utter questions into a browser-resident recorder application. It had been asserted against Samsung.

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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$2,000 awarded for Empire IP entity Fleet Connect Solutions packet generator patent prior art

Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Mani Manikandan and Nitish Jaswal, who split a cash award of $2,000 for their prior art submissions on U.S. Patent 7,742,388, owned by Fleet Connect Solutions, LLC, an NPE and entity of Empire IP. The ‘388 patent generally relates to methods of increasing packet generation in a digital communication system. It has been asserted against several including Penske Auto, Aptiv, USIC Locating Services, Rivian, Peloton, Heritage-Crystal Clean, and Southern Tire Mart.

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

Download prior art

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.