Juniper, Nokia lose PTAB bid to review ‘hat-trick’ patent
Juniper Networks and Nokia failed to convince a US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) tribunal to review a patent belonging to Core Optical Technologies (Core), marking the third occasion that it has avoided scrutiny.
In a decision handed down on Friday April 16, the board refused to subject the patent, number 6,782,211, to an inter partes review on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
The USPTO assigned the '211 patent issued to inventor Mark Core in August 2004, who later transferred the patent rights to Core in August 2011.
Since then, the patent has been the subject of disputes, attracting two other previous petitions for reviews at the USPTO’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Fijutsu challenged the patent in 2016, followed by Infinera in 2018 after Core sued them for infringement.
While Fujitsu and Infinera each succeeded in convincing US federal courts to stay legal proceedings until after the conclusion of the proceedings before the PTAB, the board declined to institute reviews of the patents on both occasions.
The latest legal wrangling over the patent arose when Core sued Nokia and Juniper in November 2019 at the US District Court for the Central District of California, accusing them of infringement.
According to Core, the patent covers technology that significantly increases data transmission rates in fibre optic networks. The ‘211 patent protects fibre optics and describes a cross-polarisation interference canceler that “enables reconstruction of two optical signals transmitted with generally orthogonal polarisation states in the same frequency band”.
In its complaint, Core accused the companies of infringement when they offered “devices that can be configured to mitigate and/or cancel cross polarisation interference in received fib[re] optic signals”.
The tech companies countered by claiming the claims in the patent were invalid on the grounds of obviousness and asked the PTAB to review them in September.
Juniper and Nokia challenged the patentability of claims 30, 32, 33, 35, and 37 of the ’211 patent arguing that they were “nothing more than an obvious combination of a coherent optical receiver with filters employing well-known algorithms for correcting for optical impairments…”
However, the board disagreed that the companies had presented enough evidence to support their stance.
“Having considered the arguments and evidence presented by petitioner and patent owner, we determine that petitioner has not demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on at least one of the challenged claims of the ’211 patent. Accordingly, we do not institute an inter partes review of the challenged claims,” it concluded.
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