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In a huge victory for privacy and the rule of law, a federal appeals court today reinstated our landmark lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), a statute that gives the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect Americans' international e-mails and telephone calls.

Unified Patents Inc. (Unified) has challenged patents asserted by this year's three most prolific patent litigants: Shipping and Transit LLC, Sportbrain Holdings LLC, and Uniloc USA, Inc. These challenges are part of Unified's ongoing efforts to protect technology areas ("zones") from non-practicing entities (NPEs), more commonly referred to as "patent trolls."

On June 27, 2016, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board instituted IPR on all challenged claims on a patent owned and asserted by the Acacia Research-associated American Vehicular Sciences, LLC. The IPR, IPR2016-00364, challenged 1, 8, 10, 12, 17-19, 26, 27, and 36 of the patent, U.S. 9,043,093.

On August 19, 2016, Unified Patents Inc. filed its 50th inter partes review petition, against a patent owned and asserted by Intellectual Ventures I LLC. The IPR2016-01643 challenges claims 1-4, 6-9, and 11-17 of U.S. Patent No. 6,775,745 B1, currently being asserted in the district court.

On August 10, 2016, Unified Patents Inc. filed a petition for inter parties review requesting review of U.S patent 5,523,791, directed to displaying images over video. The challenge, IPR2016-01571, challenged claims 2-16. A copy of the petition can be found below. Unified Patents Inc. v. John Berman, IPR2016-01571 (Aug.

The Great Recession could have spawned another era of fundamental reform, just as the Great Depression did. But the financial rescue reduced immediate demands for broader reform. Obama might still have succeeded had he framed the challenge accurately. Yet in reassuring the public that the economy would return to normal, he missed a key opportunity to expose the longer-term scourge of widening inequality and its dangers. Containing the immediate financial crisis and then claiming the economy was on the mend left the public with a diffuse set of economic problems that seemed unrelated and inexplicable, as if a town's fire chief dealt with a conflagration by protecting the biggest office buildings but leaving smaller fires simmering all over town: housing foreclosures, job losses, lower earnings, less economic security, soaring pay on Wall Street and in executive suites.

Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush's most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called a "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush's legal team." . . .

When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), "Class struggle didn't escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn't it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?" I respond by challenging the premise that class struggle has disappeared. On the contrary, I say that class struggle is going on all the time in every major institution of society. One just has to learn how to recognize it. One needn't embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently. Workers' desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn't gone away. In fact, it's inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.

"In just a few short months, we've witnessed people power in action. From the Middle East to the Midwest, movements have risen up to overturn tired dogma and challenge entrenched power. Many of us were inspired by these events. And many of us were surprised. Perhaps we were growing skeptical that people power could still work. Maybe we had forgotten a vital fact about our world: that bold citizens, united around a common mission, can still come together to create major change against enormous odds." - 350.org (April 7, 2011) "Even when people are willing to take action in concert to redistribute the pie, whether by Gandhian mobilization or use of force, this may resonate falsely, for the pie is disintegrating. Its recipe and ingredients are obsolete. And freedom attained in harsh austerity, characterized by intense competition for food, will be doubtful or of little comfort." - Jan Lundberg ("Social Justice Activists Must Take Into Account Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Transformation")

[Barring unforeseen events, I'm going to leave this post at the top of the page for today and tomorrow, as I think the events it examines, rather in detail and at length, are vitally important and merit much more attention than they've received] The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is.  On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret. The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.  It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War.  The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

On September 7, 2016, Unified Patents Inc. filed a petition for inter partes review against all claims of a patent owned and asserted by Digital Stream IP, LLC in the Eastern District of Texas. The challenged patent, 6,757,913, discusses the wireless transmission of digital data. A copy of the proceeding can be found below.

On September 8, 2016, Unified Patents Inc. filed its 55th petition for inter partes review, challenging all claims of U.S. Patent 6,442,261 as unpatentable over multiple grounds. The patent, related to identifying dropped telephone calls, had been asserted against automotive companies. A copy of the petition can be found below.

On July 25, 2016, Unified Patents Inc. filed a petition for inter partes review of all claims 1-15 of U.S. Patent 6,415,207. In IPR2016-01465, Unified challenged a patent directed to automated tracking, one that Shipping and Transit has asserted against more than 90 small businesses. A copy of the filing can be found below.

Through almost four years and nearly fifty patentability challenges, Unified Patents (UPI) has never lost a real party-in-interest (RPI) decision before the PTAB. Here are some of those decisions. Unified's members were not found to be RPIs, where there was no evidence of funding or control of a particular IPR.

On June 29, 2016, Unified Patents Inc. filed a petition for inter parties review challenging the patentability of all claims of a patent owned and asserted by Uniloc Luxembourg S.A. and Uniloc USA, Inc. The patent, U.S. Patent 8,566,960, was asserted against a number of parties on May 30, 2016, in the Eastern District of Texas.

On June 21, 2016, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) awarded adverse judgment against patent owner Qurio Holdings, Inc., prior to institution, cancelling claims 1-3, 10, 12, and 15-18 of U.S. Patent 7,787,904, as challenged via joinder by Unified in IPR2016-00998.

On June 27, 2016, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review on a patent asserted by Hybrid Audio, LLC. That filing, IPR2016-01265, challenges all independent claims of U.S. Patent RE40,281, claims 5, 12, 18, 26, 34, 41, 48, 57, 66, 71, 76, 83, 90, 95, 100, 107, 114, 116, 118, and 120.

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