Dolby HEVC/AV1 patent affirmed invalid in China

On July 31, 2024, the Beijing Intellectual Property Court (BIPC) confirmed that all claims of Chinese patent CN102256122 were invalid. The CN’122 patent is owned by Dolby International. The claims were initially found invalid by the China National Intellectual Property Administration, but Dolby appealed to the BIPC. CN102256122 was purportedly essential or related to patents purportedly essential to the Access Advance patent pool and SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 pools.

Unified was represented by Weichixue Law Firm for the appeal, and the case was managed by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks.

InterDigital AV1 patent held invalid after appeal in China

The Beijing Intellectual Property Court confirmed the invalidity of all challenged claims of CN101491099, owned by Interdigital. The CN’099 patent was previously deemed essential in the SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 pools.

Unified was represented by Tao Chen, Yu Yan, and Peter Zhang of the Beijing Wei Chixue Law Firm, and the case was managed by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Roshan Mansinghani.

GEVC patent in SISVEL AV1 pool appears not essential

As part of an ongoing series examining the patent holders and pools erroneously designating patents as essential, we highlight U.S. Patent 10,460,344 titled “Region merging and coding parameter reuse via merging.” This patent is owned by GE Video Compression (GEVC). GEVC has designated the ’344 patent as essential to the AV1 standard as a part of SISVEL’s AV1 Patent Pool. See AV1 Patent List, AV1 Family AV1-040, available at https://www.sisvel.com/images/documents/Video-Coding-Platform/PatentList_AV1.pdf.

GEVC’s U.S. Patent 10,460,344 should not be considered to be essential to the AV1 standard. The ’344 patent is directed to a decoder that uses a merging or grouping of simply connected regions using a reduced amount of data. ’344 patent, Abstract. Namely, a merge indicator indicates whether a region currently being decoded should be reconstructed based on a motion coding parameter. If the indicator indicates copying, the appropriate vector is copied. If the indicator indicates compute, the appropriate motion vector is computed.  Id., claims 1, 9, 17, 26. 

The concept of a merge indicator is an evolved form of motion vector competition. See, e.g., Joel Jung and Guillaume Laroche, “Competition-Based Scheme for Motion Vector Selection and Coding,” VCEG Contribution VCEG-AC06r1, Klagenfurt, Austria, July 2006. In contrast to the ’344 patent and prior motion vector competition literature, the AV1 standard does not employ a merge indicator; rather, the concepts of merging and computing a motion vector is spread over multiple values, not merely an indicator to either copy the ap or compute the motion vector.  See, e.g., AV1 §§ 5.11.26 (assign_mv syntax code used to limit the maximum size of motion vectors); 5.11.23 (syntax); 6.10.22 (semantics describing new_mv, zero_mv, and ref_mv);. 

Thus, the ’344 patent does not appear to be essential to the AV1 standard despite being declared as essential. The public would benefit from appropriate scrutiny of patent pools that allegedly cover critical technical standards, particularly open-source standards such as AV1.

KAIST & ETRI AV1/HEVC Japanese patent opposition successful

On March 14, 2022, the Japanese Patent Office found that the original claims of JP6855419 were obvious in view of the known art. The JP '419 is owned by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). The JP‘419 patent is related to patents that have been designated essential in both the Access Advance and AV1 pools.

Unified was represented by Yukihiro Takemoto and Toshio Sakai of Ace-ai IP Law Firm in Japan, and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Jessica L.A. Marks.

InterDigital AV1/VP9 Japanese patent opposition successful

On August 4, 2022, the Japanese Patent Office found that the only claim of JP6968024 was obvious and also not novel in view of the known art. The JP '024 patent is owned by InterDigital VC Holdings. The ‘024 patent is related to patents that have been designated as essential to SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 pools.

Unified is represented by Yukihiro Takemoto and Toshio Sakai of Ace-ai IP Law Firm in Japan, and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Jessica L.A. Marks.