Monticello Enterprises payment patent found invalid

On November 7, 2024, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) entered a final rejection of all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 11,468,497, owned and asserted by Monticello Enterprises LLC. The ‘497 patent relates to transmitting user payment data to a merchant device based on inputs received from a user. The patent has been asserted against Starbucks, Petco, and Macy's. 

View district court litigations by Monticello. Unified was represented by in-house counsel, Kelly Hughes and Jessica L.A. Marks, in this proceeding.

To view the reexamination request, visit Unified’s Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90019491

Velos Media video codec patent challenged

On November 14, 2024, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 9,955,171, owned by Velos Media, an NPE. The '171 patent is generally directed to the selection of a set of prediction modes for encoding and decoding video. The patent explains that conventional methods use only one set of prediction modes, and that by providing additional prediction sets with different directions, rather than a single prediction set, efficiency can be increased. The ‘171 patent is a listed patent in Velos’ global patent assets.

Unified is represented by Jon Bowser and Adam Erickson of Haynes and Boone, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Michelle Aspen, in this proceeding.

IP Edge entity Communication Advances camera patent found invalid

On November 5, 2024, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) entered a notice of intent to issue a reexamination certificate canceling all claims of U.S. Patent 8,823,826, owned by Communication Advances LLC, an NPE and entity of IP Edge. The ‘826 patent was asserted against GM in one of IP Edge’s first litigation campaigns after three of the lawyers associated with the NPE were referred for discipline by Delaware Chief Judge Connolly for violating professional conduct rules. The patent is directed to digital cameras and image processing methods for digital cameras where an application is triggered when the subject’s eye-gazing direction meets an eye-gazing criterion.

View district court litigations by Communication Advances. Unified was represented by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and David Seastrunk.

To view the reexamination request, visit Unified’s Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90019430

$2,000 for Jeffrey Gross entity, AttestWave, networking patent prior art

Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 29 of U.S. Patent 7,895,643, asserted by AttestWave, LLC, an NPE and entity of Jeffrey M. Gross. The ‘643 patent addresses trusted operations in computer networks and focuses on assuring trusted flows of communications by enforcing compliance with defined specifications. It has been asserted against Sophos, BlackBerry, SOTI, Honeywell, and Cortado Mobile Solutions.

The contest will expire on January 19, 2025. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for this contest.

CNCF launches Cloud-Native Heroes Challenge with Unified Patents

On November 13, 2024, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge at their KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2024 conference. This challenge will be a series of crowdsourced prior art contests utilizing Unified Patents’ PATROLL website. To learn more, visit www.cncf.io/heroes and read about the inaugural contest here.

PATROLL is the world’s first crowd-sourced prior art contest forum where Unified Patents puts a monetary bounty on PAE- and NPE-owned patents. We engage the general public to submit prior art to improve overall patent quality. All submissions are reviewed by Unified's legal team to identify winning prior art, and we provide the invalidity claim chart to the world on the PATROLL portal.

CNCF is co-hosting this program with Unified Patents, the Linux Foundation’s partner in patent troll deterrence since 2019. Unified Patents is the only organization that uses offensive community-driven strategies to deter patent trolls.

Find more information on CNCF and the inaugural challenge within the links below: