With powerful mobile devices and televisions widely available, high-quality video is an essential feature for consumers.  The High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, a new video coding standard, offers improvements over older coding standards.  As is often the case, there are hundreds of patents that all purport to be novel and essential to the HEVC standard.

A consumer electronics client hired Crown Point to perform a prelitigation, detailed prior art search analysis of nearly 100 of these purportedly HEVC standard essential patents to assess the potential license cost and value to the client.

METHODOLOGY

Crown Point has nearly a decade of experience analyzing video standards, including predecessor standards to the HEVC standard, such as H.264.  In addition to our internal Crown Point team, we assembled an outside group of video coding experts whom Crown Point consulted with regarding search strategies.

The prior art search involved analyzing thousands of patent prior art references from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Korea, China, Australia, and the European Patent Office.  Using our in-depth knowledge of standards bodies, Crown Point also analyzed HEVC and H.264 standards contributions from hundreds of companies, which provided both prior art as well as further search guidance.

Leading the team were a Crown Point Advisors partner, who has significant patent litigation experience at Sidley Austin and a decade of video coding patent experience, and a senior Crown Point analyst, who has five years of litigation prior art search experience in the video coding field.  In addition to prior art searching, Crown Point focused the outside experts’ efforts and guided the search for litigation-quality prior art.

Since the search was critical for the client, timely discussions were essential in providing the client with the best prior art.  Crown Point held weekly conference calls with the lead law firm to coordinate search efforts and to discuss search strategies. We posted the prior art to a secure online team room, so the prior art was available globally, 24 hours, seven days a week.

RESULTS

The prior art search resulted in hundreds of anticipatory references, including patent prior art and prior art standards contributions. The client was rapidly able to develop licensing discussion strategies from these results.

Contact us for more information.