Some patent holders and pools designate their patents as relevant or essential to a standard without proper scrutiny or analysis. As part of an ongoing series examining this dubious practice, we highlight U.S. Patent 10,057,603. The ’603 patent is owned by GE Video Compression. Access Advance LLC had identified this patent as purportedly essential to the H.265 (HEVC) standard as part of the Access Advance Patent Pool. But after an ex parte reexamination initiated by Unified Patents led to a significant narrowing of the claim, Access Advance no longer lists this patent as essential. 

Access Advance had identified claim 1 of the ’603 Patent as allegedly essential. That claim recites:

1. A decoder for decoding a data stream including encoded data of a video, the decoder comprising:

an entropy decoding engine configured to decode data from the data stream based on an arithmetic decoding scheme to obtain a sequence of symbols, 

wherein, with respect to at least one symbol of the sequence of symbols, the entropy decoding engine is configured to:

select a context corresponding to the at least one symbol, and 

entropy decode the at least one symbol using the selected context based on the arithmetic decoding scheme, which includes updating a probability model associated with the selected context at one of a first update rate under a high-efficiency mode of entropy decoding and a second update rate, that is lower than the first update rate, under a low-complexity mode of entropy decoding; and

a reconstructor configured to reconstruct at least a portion of the video based on the sequence of symbols.

Unified filed its reexamination request on December 21, 2020, based on prior art that clearly disclosed claim 1. Given the strength of the prior art, the USPTO quickly determined that a substantial new question of patentability had been raised. A formal rejection issued on June 25, 2021, detailing how the prior art rendered the claim invalid. Of importance here, the claims were found to only cover the specific, corresponding disclosures in the specification rather than the broad, functional language that was clearly taught by the prior art. In the following months, the patent owner attempted to dissuade the examiners of this interpretation, but those attempts failed, and the reexamination concluded on January 26, 2022. 

Under U.S. law, a patentee is only allowed to use the broad, functional language at issue here if it is willing to be limited to the specific disclosures in the patent that correspond to the functional language. Patent asserters like Access Advance have tried to shirk this requirement when asserting their patents, taking advantage of claim language that looks broad on its face. Worse, Access Advance kept this patent in its May 2022 list of allegedly-essential patents only to finally remove it from its October 2022 list, nearly 10 months after the reexamination concluded.

Hence, the importance of formal scrutiny is demonstrable. Overbroad assertions of hundreds of patents that allegedly cover critical technical standards can, and should, be meaningfully analyzed. In the end, the public benefits when it is clear which are the truly valid and essential patents. Challenges to such assertions have a proven track record of sifting the wheat from the chaff.