Patexia Insight 29: Analysis of Patent Owners in Apple's IPR Petitions

This week, our Data Science Team continued reviewing Apple’s IPR cases with a focus on patent owners. We wanted to learn which entities had their patents challenged by Apple since the inception of Inter-Partes Review in 2012. We’ve unveiled the top 10 patent owners, which were named in 148 IPR challenges out of 267 filed by Apple from 2012 to 2016. This represents 55 percent of all challenges filed by Apple during this period. VirnetX was ranked first, named in 39 cases. That is almost 15 percent of all of Apple’s IPR cases. The goal of this investigation was to learn more about the distribution of cases and whether the challenges are focused primarily on a small number of companies.

In total, we learned that 65 unique patent owners – from individuals to non-practicing entities to even large companies such as Ericsson – were named as patent owners in the 267 IPR petitions filed by Apple during the studied time period.

Apple's IPR Challenges	267
Unique Patent Owners	65

 

However, as shown in the above chart, the distribution of cases was not the same. VirnetX, a company that has been in battles with Apple and many other companies, had 15 of its patents challenged 39 times by Apple. In fact, many other companies have also challenged the same patents with different prior arts. In total, 63 IPR petitions have been filed by different companies against these patents.

Patent Owner (2012 - 2016)	Cases	Patents	Denied	Final Decision	Instituted	Other
VirnetX	39	15	20	15	2	2
ContentGuard Holdings	29	9	29	0	0	0
Longitude Flash Memory Systems	15	12	12	0	0	3
Tasler	14	4	0	0	0	14
Ericsson	12	9	12	0	0	0
ZiiLabs	12	9	10	0	0	2
TracBeam	8	4	4	0	0	4
Parthenon Unified Memory	7	5	0	0	7	0
Evolutionary Intelligence	6	2	5	1	0	0
OpenTV	6	6	2	3	0	1

 

To better understand the outcome of challenges filed by Apple against the top 10 patent owners, we decided to review and compare those cases with the average of all 267 cases filed by Apple. We had reported the analysis of Apple’s IPR cases in our Patexia Insight 26. On average, 64 percent of all cases filed against the top 10 patent owners were denied, compared to about 47 percent of all IPR challenges Apple filed. 

In some cases in fact, Apple filed a Motion to Dismiss. For example in all 12 IPR challenges against Ericsson, Apple filed a Motion to Dismiss on December 29, 2015. In some other cases, such as those against Tasler, the cases were filed fairly recently (October 2016) and remain in early stages. The following table shows the top 5 entities with the highest denial rate:

Patent Owner	All Cases	Patents	Cases Denied	Percentage (%)
ContentGuard Holdings	29	9	29	100%
Ericsson	12	9	12	100%
Summit 6	6	2	6	100%
ZiiLabs	12	9	10	83%
Evolutionary Intelligence	6	2	5	83%

 

Our analysis of Apple’s IPR challenges show that certain entities have been targeted more often than others. In fact, 55 percent of the total of 267 petitions were filed against only 10 companies. This could be because of several reasons, such as importance of those patents and the potential product / market that they covered. In some cases, the owner may decide to settle early on, while in some other cases and in the absence of any settlement, the patent may be challenged multiple times with different prior arts. This may be an indication that the owners of these patents believe in the strength of their patents and prefer to continue the litigation without an early settlement.

In the coming weeks, we will review all the patent owners named in IPR petitions and will identify the top 10. We will then expand the study to better understand how their patents have been challenged and which companies have challenged their patents. We then will further look at the outcome to determine if any of those challenged claims survived after being targeted so many times by different entities.