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15 July 2019PatentsRory O'Neill

Fed Circuit hands Samsung new review of video coding patent

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has handed a victory to Samsung after ruling that a work does not need to be widely disseminated in order to qualify as prior art.

In the ruling, issued on Friday, July 12 the Federal Circuit found that the PTAB erred in its decision that a working draft of the High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265) standard was not publicly accessible.

The case relates to an Infobridge-owned patent, which covers a method of encoding and decoding video data (US number 8,917,772), which is essential to the H.265 standard.

Samsung sought inter partes review of the patent in 2018, on the grounds that a working draft of the H.265 standard was already publicly available.

The standard was developed by the joint collaborative team on video coding (JCV-VC), a sub-working group of the International Telecommunication Union.

Samsung argued that the standard was publicly accessible when a fourth working draft (WD4) was published on the JCV-VC website following a 2011 meeting in Torino, Italy.

The standard’s lead author also distributed the WD4 reference via a mailing list email to attendees of the Torino meeting as well as other “interested individuals”.

In its review, the PTAB sided with Infobridge, finding that there was no evidence a person of ordinary skill in the art would have located the reference on the JCV-VC website.

The PTAB also ruled that the mailing list email amounted to only a “limited distribution”, and was not “generally disseminated to persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the art”.

But the Federal Circuit agreed with Samsung that, in the case of the listserv email, the PTAB was “confusing access with accessibility”.

According to the court, a petitioner need only prove that a person of ordinary skill in the art could have accessed the information, rather than proving that the information was widely received.

“The board departed from this well-established principle by repeatedly faulting Samsung for not proving that the WD4 reference was ‘generally’ or ‘widely’ disseminated,” the judgment said.

The PTAB should have considered whether Samsung’s evidence established whether a person of ordinary skill in the art could have accessed the reference based on the mailing list email, the Federal Circuit found.

The court stopped short, however, of ruling on this issue, and remanded the PTAB’s decision for further proceedings.

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