On August 17, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Velos Media, LLC holding the only claim of U.S. Patent 8,767,824 unpatentable. The ‘824 patent is owned by Velos Media, LLC. Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard (such as the ‘824 patent). Unified filed this challenge as part of its ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.

The ‘824 patent and its corresponding extended patent family represents approximately 3% of Velos' known U.S. assets. The ’824 patent, generally directed to techniques for video encoding and decoding, was originally assigned to Sharp before being transferred to Velos in 2017.

Unified was represented by David Cavanaugh from WilmerHale, Theodoros Konstantakopoulos from Desmarais, and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Ashraf Fawzy, in this proceeding. Visit Unified’s Portal for more information about its Video Codec landscape (OPAL) and standard submission repository (OPEN). To read the decision and review the case record, view IPR2019-00635 on the Portal.