InterDigital AV1/VP9 patent challenge instituted

On March 13, 2025, less than three weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 10,080,024, owned by InterDigital VC Holdings. The '024 patent is directed to increasing video encoding efficiency by dividing a block of pixels into groups and using different intra-planar prediction methods for each group. The patent had previously been designated as essential to SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 patent pools. The reexamination was filed as part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in the SEP Video Codec Zone.

View district court litigations by InterDigital. Unified is represented by Jon Bowser and Dagim Tilahun at Haynes Boone, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Michelle Aspen.

To view the reexamination request, visit Unified’s Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90019865

Another InterDigital AV1 patent challenged

On February 26, 2025, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 10,080,024, owned by InterDigital VC Holdings. The '024 patent is directed to increasing video encoding efficiency by dividing a block of pixels into groups and using different intra-planar prediction methods for each group. The patent had previously been designated as essential to SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 patent pools. The reexamination was filed as part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in the SEP Video Codec Zone.

View district court litigations by InterDigital. Unified is represented by Jon Bowser and Dagim Tilahun at Haynes Boone, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Michelle Aspen.

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.