$3,000 awarded for Cloud-Native Heroes Challenge - prior art found on Valtrus '538

Unified Patents and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) are pleased to announce the winning prior art submissions in the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, a patent troll bounty program. The results of this contest demonstrate the benefits of engaging open source developers and technologists with domain expertise in the fight against patent trolls.

We would like to thank the dozens of high-quality submissions that were made on the patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone and offer 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.

Contest & Winning Submissions

Kriss Vickers and Andrei Gilya shared a $3,000 award for their prior art submissions on U.S. Patent 8,379,538, owned and asserted by Valtrus Innovations Ltd., an entity of New PP Licensing LLC. The '538 patent describes using a machine-readable monitoring model to store and maintain the configuration of a monitoring environment. A monitoring element reads that model and automatically adjusts how it operates based on the defined configuration. The patent had been asserted against SAP America and both Starbucks and Google have filed declaratory judgment actions against the patent.

WINNING PATENT SUBMISSIONS

Find more information on CNCF and the prior art challenges within the links below:

Download Winning Charts

Flash Uplink hard drive firmware patent challenge granted

On August 19, 2026, two months after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,426,633 owned and asserted by Flash Uplink LLC, an NPE and entity of Quest Patent Research Corporation. The ‘633 patent generally relates to updating disk-drive firmware with minimal downtime.

View district court litigations by Flash Uplink. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Jenn Bisk and David Seastrunk, in this proceeding.

To view the reexamination request, visit Unified’s Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90016409

PulseLink networking patent prior art found

The team at Unified used Pearl to successfully identify and chart prior art against U.S. Patent 7,941,677, owned by PulseLink Systems, LLC, an NPE. The ‘677 patent relates to a network device that intelligently manages power from multiple sources, including Power over Ethernet and an independent power supply. The patent has been asserted against HPE.

Identified Prior Art

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Jeffrey M. Gross entity, G98 Networks, patent being investigated

The team at Unified is using Pearl to identify and chart prior art against patents owned by G98 Networks LLC, an NPE and Jeffrey M. Gross entity. G98 Networks has sued several companies accusing network management products that interface with a software-defined networking (SDN) controller. For more details contact info@unifiedpatents.com.

NovaCloud Licensing streaming patent challenge granted

On August 10, 2026, four weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,145,721 owned and asserted by NovaCloud Licensing LLC, an NPE. The ‘721 patent relates to a method of downloading a multimedia file from a server to a user device using, at least in part, a bandwidth-limited connection. It is currently asserted against Charter Communications, Comcast, Amazon, SAP, Meta, and Cox Communications.

View district court litigations by NovaCloud. Unified is represented by Steven Shipe of Barnes & Thornburg and by in-house counsel, Kyla Butler and TJ Murphy, in this proceeding.

To view the reexamination request, visit Unified’s Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90016433