The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a
Patent Trial & Appeal Board (Board) obviousness decision after
finding that the patent owner failed to explain how its cited
extrinsic evidence supported its proposed claim
construction. Uniloc 2017 LLC v. Netflix, Inc., Case
No. 21-2085 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 15, 2022) (Dyk,
Taranto, Hughes, JJ.) (nonprecedential).
Uniloc owns a patent directed to a “more efficient”
method for encoding videos by only coding at the pixel level when
necessary and, where possible, reusing code for macroblocks in the
background area. Netflix petitioned for inter
partes review of several claims in Uniloc's
patent. The Board ultimately found the claims unpatentable as
obvious. Uniloc appealed.