On September 4, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Velos Media, LLC holding all claims of US Patent 9,979,981 unpatentable. Velos also moved to amend the claims, but the Board denied the motion to amend. The ’981 patent is generally directed to techniques for image processing, including encoding efficiency for color difference signals and reduction in address calculations for memory access.

The ‘981 patent and its corresponding extended patent family is one of the largest families known to be owned by Velos. Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard. The ’981 patent is part of a family of patents that were originally assigned to Sony Corporation and transferred to Velos Media in 2017. 

Visit Unified’s Public Portal for more information about its Video Codec landscape (OPAL) and standard submission repository (OPEN). To read the petition and review the case record, view IPR2019-00707 on the Portal. Unified was represented by David Cavanaugh from WilmerHale, Theodoros Konstantakopoulos from Desmarais LLP, and in-house counsel, Jung Hahm and Jonathan Stroud, in this proceeding.