On October 19 the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in Unified Patents Inc. v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming, LLC, IPR2018-00883, rejecting Realtime’s argument that Unified’s members were unnamed real-parties in interest. In its first Unified decision discussing Applications in Internet Time, LLC v. RPX (AIT), the Board rejected arguments that Unified’s Content Zone members were unnamed RPIs, finding that would overextend the AIT analysis and the common law:

[W]e do not find that membership in Petitioner’s Content Zone and the general benefits accruing from such membership to be sufficient under the principles espoused by AIT and the common law to require that all such members be identified as RPIs under § 312(a)(2).

Paper 36, at 19.

Unified provided discovery and the parties briefed the issue prior to institution. The Board distinguished Unified membership from the factors discussed in AIT, noting the lack of evidence that anyone: (1) controlled, directed or directly financed the proceeding, (2) communicated with Unified regarding the filing or (3) even knew beforehand of Unified’s intent to file the proceeding. Id. at 16. The Board noted that there was “no evidence that any member desires review of the patent but is time-barred from filing an IPR,” further distinguishing AIT. Id.

The Board determined that there is a reasonable likelihood Unified will be able to show that U.S. Patent 8,934,535 is unpatentable and therefore instituted trial. The ‘535 patent is owned by Realtime Adaptive Streaming, LLC, a Realtime Data affiliate and well-known NPE. The ‘535 patent, directed to selecting, compressing, and decompressing data, has been asserted in 26 district court cases, 8 of which were pending as of the decision.

View all of Realtime's District Court litigation here. To read the decision and to view the IPR proceeding’s record, visit our PTAB Portal.