Fortress entity, Uniloc, patent held unpatentable
On December 8, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Uniloc 2017 LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 6,519,005 unpatentable. The ‘005 patent, owned and asserted by Uniloc 2017 LLC, a Fortress Investment Group affiliate and owned by SoftBank Group, relates to a method for motion estimation for a digital video encoder. The ‘005 patent has been asserted against numerous streaming and multimedia companies, including Amazon, American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Bitmovin, Google, Hulu, Netflix, Roku, Sling TV, and Vudu. The cases against Google, Sling, Verizon, AT&T, and Netflix are still open.
Unified is represented by Scott McKeown and Victor Cheung at Ropes and Gray, and by in-house counsel, Jordan Rossen and Roshan Mansinghani, in this proceeding. View Uniloc's district court litigation. To read the petition and view the entire case proceeding, see Unified's Portal.